Category: Street Photography

A special weekend in San Francisco – walking the streets with Valérie Jardin and her San Francisco Street Photography workshop participants. On Saturday, we had the beautiful bright sunny day that street photographers love. Today we had a mostly overcast day. Valérie is a great workshop leader – I had a special time with her in Paris in the fall of 2014 and will be going to Rome with her later this year. I highly recommend her workshops!

I was shooting – seriously for the first time – with a new Fujifilm X70. I came away delighted with the experience – this is a great camera for street photography – especially when mostly shooting in full automatic mode. I like to set the ISO to float between 1600 and 6400 – which helps push the shutter speed up and the aperture more open. The camera is ideal for those quick shots – where you really don’t want to bother with a viewfinder (the X70 doesn’t have one) and you can just learn to trust the 28mm wide angle of the fixed lens along with the camera’s programming to make great images.

For the last year I’ve been almost exclusively shooting with the Fujifilm X100T – loving its 35mm fixed lens and learning how to use its controls to help me shoot street images. For this weekend, I had the X100T in the bottom of my camera bag – as a backup – but I spent the whole weekend shooting with just the X70. I’ve included a few more images from the weekend below – my full album of my best shots is here on Flickr.

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Fujifilm X-E2 Photography Photography - Fujifilm X-E2 San Francisco/California Street Photography

Into the Light in San Francisco

Post author By Scott Loftesness
Post date February 12, 2016
1 Comment on Into the Light in San Francisco

Earlier this week I was in San Francisco for meetings – and I went in a bit early to do some street photography.

Here’s one of the first images I captured after just coming up from the Embarcadero BART station.

I was shooting with my Fujifilm X-E2 with the new v4.0 firmware. An amazing upgrade by Fuji to this great little camera!

Looking into the light is one of my favorite scenes – taught to me by looking at the amazing work of Fan Ho!

Black and White Fujifilm X-E2 Monochrome Photography Photography Photography - Black & White Photography - Fujifilm X-E2 San Francisco/California Street Photography

Scooter

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Yesterday was my first time on the streets of San Francisco after upgrading my Fujifilm X-E2 to the latest firmware update (V 4.0). One of the best things about using Fujifilm cameras is how they have regularly provided significant firmware updates to older cameras – and this update to the X-E2 is a significant one – especially to the autofocus capabilities of the camera.

This is an example – shot into the morning light using the camera’s zone focusing mode.

Cuba Photography Photography - Nikon D600 Street Photography

RCA Victor

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Along Havana’s Neptune Street was the old RCA Victor studio. This image is from January 2013. Apparently the building is mostly gone now.

Cuba Photography Street Photography

Cuban Nights

Whites - Lady in Red - Havana - 2013 — Whites – Lady in Red – Havana – 2013

I wrote yesterday about Paul Graham’s exhibition at Pier 24 in San Francisco. Graham’s exhibition features three different approaches to photography. One of his approaches he called “American Nights” – consisting of images that had a high key, sort of faded look.

While enjoying the whole show, I found Graham’s “American Night” images the most interesting of the exhibition – and wanted to try the technique on a couple of my images. Here’s my first example – “Cuban Nights” version of one of my favorite images from Havana in 2013 that I titled “Lady in Red”.

The whiteness was added to this image in Photoshop by adding a white Color Fill adjustment layer and adjusting the opacity to approximate what I saw in Graham’s images. The original image can be seen here – but don’t look at it until you’ve stared at this version for a bit of time and begin to see some of the details emerging. That’s the fun part of Graham’s technique – at least for me!

And it works especially well with large prints on the wall – more so than with this small web image version!

Tags american nights, paul graham

Black and White Monochrome Photography Photography Photography - Black & White Photography - Fujifilm X-E2 San Francisco/California Street Photography

That Glance

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Today I joined a group of friends to visit the current exhibition of Paul Graham’s work at Pier 24 in San Francisco. Pier 24 is a beautiful gallery for the display of photography – with large neutral spaces in many different rooms – and controlled reservation-based entry to minimize any feeling of crowding the in the space. It’s a joy.

Graham’s work was organized into three bodies of work: American Night (1998–2002), a shimmer of possibility (2004–06), and The Present (2009–11). In his video, Graham talked about how each body of work was based on one aspect of the camera. American Night was based upon aperture – overexposing the images to create the soft white images. A shimmer was based upon time – snapping multiple images in a sequence to tell the story of something in a series of images. The Present was based upon the use of selective focus – or very shallow depth of field – to shift the viewer’s attention to a different point of interest in each image.

After watching Graham’s video explanation of each – and walking the exhibitions, I came away really liking his American Night collection best of all. These images at first look like nothing – you glance and them and want to move on. But when you stop and spend time with each image, your eye begins to see details that you originally overlooked. As you move closer to the image, the effect is enhanced – you start seeing more. A lovely treatment – and something I want to play with in the future.

Meanwhile, as we departed Pier 24, I came across this man walking toward me in the shadows under the pier’s overhang. I grabbed a quick shot and then he sat down. I continued walked toward him – and asked him – with a quick motion of my hand with my camera asking if it was OK to take his picture. He said yes – and then I captured him in this pose glancing off to his left. One of those great moments when it all comes together in street photography!

Tags pier 24

Black and White Monochrome Photography Photography Photography - Black & White Photoshop Photoshop CC San Francisco/California Street Photography

Adding Presence to Black and White Photos

Post author By Scott Loftesness
Post date January 30, 2016
2 Comments on Adding Presence to Black and White Photos

Three years ago I was in Havana participating in a person-to-person cultural exchange organized by the Santa Fe Photographic Workshops. One of the photography group leaders at that session was George DeWolfe. While I wasn’t in his group, we did share breakfast a couple of days and I really enjoyed getting to know him a bit more.

After that meeting, I’ve followed George from a distance – and I particularly enjoy the work he’s been doing for years around the notion of adding “presence” to black and white images. I haven’t been using his techniques, however – but a blog post that I read this morning by Julia Anna Gospodarou brought me back to George and re-learning one of his simple techniques for adding presence to an image in Photoshop.

Last night I processed the top image below taken on a photo walk with Doug Kaye in San Francisco last Thursday. We often find the Muni bus stops along San Francisco’s Market Street to be good “stages” – and we await for interesting actors to appear. I was pretty happy with the image last night but when I looked at it again this morning I found it a bit “flat”.

Reading Julia Anna’s interview with George got me motivated to try a quick version of one of his techniques for adding presence – using the Color Range tool in Photoshop to separately adjust the brightness and contract of the highlight, mid-tone, and shadow areas of the image. This is a super easy technique – using the Color Range tool to create a selection of, for example, the highlights in the image – then use a Brightness/Contrast adjustment layer to tweak the brightness and contrast of just the highlights. Do the same thing for the mid-tones and then for the shadows. Takes about 2 minutes to adjust the image this way – and it does help reduce the flatness and spread out the tonality of the image to make it more appealing. The second image below shows the result of my quick adjustments this morning.

There are other ways to accomplish this – with much finer grain control, for example, you can use Tony Kuyper’s Luminosity Mask technique to also do this. But the quickness of using Color Range with a few Brightness/Contrast adjustment layers makes for a very speedy workflow. Thanks to George DeWolfe for sharing this technique – which he first wrote about back in 2007, almost ten years ago.

Tags color range, presence

Black and White Fujifilm X-E2 Monochrome Photography Photography Photography - Black & White Photography - Fujifilm X-E2 San Francisco/California Street Photography

San Francisco Streets – January 2016

Post author By Scott Loftesness
Post date January 29, 2016
No Comments on San Francisco Streets – January 2016

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My photo buddy Doug Kaye and I met up yesterday in San Francisco for our first walk together of 2016. As usual we met at the Ferry Building – and immediately got immersed in the setup activities for Super Bowl City which is opening tomorrow. It was very cool to see the scope of this event – as lots of craftsmen, stage hands, and security staff did their work in Justin Herman Plaza and up Market Street.

Doug was shooting with a new – used but mint – Rolleiflex film camera. It was fun watching him look down to capture shots – Vivian Maier style. Meanwhile, I was shooting with my first Fujifilm X camera – the Fujifilm X-E2. I had a new lens – the 35mm f/2 prime – and put the X-E2 into black and white (with yellow filter) mode – and had a great time shooting. This camera really does work wonders in your hands – and the Fujifilm monochrome film treatment just looks superb right out of the camera.

Some examples follow. It was a very good day.

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New York City Photography Street Photography

Amazing Grace

John Boyd - New York - 2015 — John Boyd – New York – 2015

I came upon a magical moment last June in New York’s Central Park. We were walking through the park and came across this underground pavilion – with beautiful voices filling the chamber.

Turns out the Boyd family is known for singing their best in this space. It was magical to hear John sing Amazing Grace in this place – something I’ll carry with me as one of those memories you try to go back to when you just want to settle your mind down!

Black and White Fujifilm X-T1 Monochrome Photography Photography Photography - Black & White Photography - Fujifilm X-T1 San Francisco/California Street Photography

No Excuses

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Citicorp Center in San Francisco is at One Sansome Street – just across from the former Crown Zellerbach building.

This stretch of Sansome just off Market Street is the province of motorcyclists – the parking is just for them. The architecture of the Citicorp Center provides an interesting stage – and there’s the Montgomery Street BART station entrance just off to the left. A locus for some fun street photography in San Francisco!

On a bright March morning in 2015, this bike rider was eyeing for a spot.

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