The plaza at 101 California Street in San Francisco is one of our favorite venues for street photography. The light in this space can be magnificent – and on the morning in late August is was shining right down the edge of the building.
With my Fujifilm X100T, I capture this shot of the guy walking into the foreground – with the shadowy figure in the background. Thus the title “In the Shadows”.
Each year I do a portfolio book of the images I’ve taken during the year. This year, I modified the plan a bit – here’s what I wrote in the book:
For the last four years, I’ve been publishing a portfolio book of the best images I made during each year. The annual process of reviewing my year’s work is both rewarding and somewhat daunting – but it is a delight when the book is finally finished and I’m holding it in my hands!
This year I’m taking a new approach – focusing on doing more “thematic” books based on my travels, events, etc. during the year. For 2015, I’ve already completed separate photo books on my travels to India, Australia/New Zealand and my New York City street photography workshop with Peter Turnley. They’re beautiful mini-portfolios of those events.
This book has a singular focus on the images I made during 2015 on the streets of San Francisco. For the last couple of years, my photo buddy Doug Kaye and I have been regularly meeting at the Ferry Building in San Francisco on Fridays when our schedules permit. We head out from there – sometimes just walking the streets adjacent to the Ferry Building and other times hopping on a Muni bus or streetcar and traveling to one of San Francisco’s neighborhoods. We have a wonderful time – going out “empty” and looking for the good light. We’ve had great fun along the way – and some great lunches! Putting this year’s book together has brought back many good memories of our wandering on San Francisco’s streets!
Almost all of these 2015 images were shot using Fujifilm cameras – primarily the wonderful X100T.
My photo buddy Doug Kaye let me borrow his new Leica Q to shoot with during one of our regular Friday photo walks on the streets of San Francisco.
The Q is conceptually similar to my favorite camera: the Fujifilm X100T. I’ve been shooting almost exclusively using the X100T for street photography for over a year. It’s a beautiful camera for street work – and has been a joy for me to learn and enjoy.
What struck me about the Q was just how similar it is to the X100T. Both cameras are very easy to shoot with in full automatic everything mode – but both cameras also give you great control over all of the settings you might want to manage manually.
Looking at this initial set of images, I am struck by the tonality of the images – there’s something called the “Leica look” – and the images have just that touch of a special look to them – that’s hard to describe but very much there.
Here are a few more images from today’s exploration with the wonderful Leica Q.
A couple of years ago, Eric Kim wrote one of his wonderful blog posts on the notion of letting your photos marinate “in order to really discover if they are any good or not.”
One of the things I most enjoy is looking back through my Lightroom catalog at images I’ve shot a year, or two, or more years ago. Sometimes I’ll just remember a situation – and go searching back through my catalog to try to remember. It’s always striking to me just how often I’ll something completely new in those images.
One of my first examples of this took place over a year from my first trip to Havana in January 2013. I was wondering whether I could assemble a book of portraits from my images shot in Havana – none of which were actually taken as portraits. I wanted to experiment with both black and white and a square format style – and it worked out beautifully. I found faces – portraits – in images I’d previously overlooked. Like seeing with new eyes all over again. See my Faces of Cuba images.
Last night I was back in a Havana mood again – this time looking forward to my next trip to Cuba in January 2016. I came across these two images – both of which just made me smile and remember the moments when they were taken. Marinate indeed – these two have been down deep in my Lightroom catalog for almost three years – and they resurfaced last night to my delight.
Last week I did a post about multiples in San Francisco street photography. It’s a fun – and, frankly, a pretty lazy technique. Why do I say lazy? Because you simply plant yourself at an interesting location (a carefully chosen interesting location!) and shoot away. The goal is to capture a series of images of the same area over a period of several seconds. Depending on your gear, you can fire away in single shot mode – or you can set your camera on burst mode – and just hold down the shutter button.
On my Fujifilm X100T, I typically set the Drive setting to Low burst and it works great. But you can just do this with your iPhone – simply hold down the shutter button and the iPhone will fire off a burst of images. The iPhone 6 fires at about 10 frames per second – so you’ll get quite a few images in just a few seconds of holding down the shutter button.
Doug recommends putting your camera in manual for these kinds of shots – so that the camera isn’t choosing different settings in between the shots. He’s more of a perfectionist in this regard than I am. I mostly just don’t worry about it.
The fun comes after importing the images into Lightroom and then editing them as layers in Photoshop. Photoshop’s auto-align will correct for any hand-held movement between the images. You’ll end up with a layer stack of images – all aligned. Now you need to look through the layers and decide how to blend them – to bring in details from various images/layers. That’s the fun part – and it can take a while to get it right.
The image above was shot by me standing behind Doug Kaye as he was using this technique on Clay Street in San Francisco’s Chinatown.
The image below is one that I constructed using these techniques while just standing along Stockton Street and capturing individual shots as people moved through my frame. One of the characteristics of these images that you’ll notice in this one is that people look just too close together. That’s because they weren’t – actually!
On my last couple of outings on the streets of San Francisco with Doug Kaye, we’ve been playing with capturing rapid bursts of images and then blending them together in Photoshop (using layers and layer masks) to create “multiples” – images with repeated people as they walk through a scene. Doug has also been experimenting with bringing multiple people together in a single shot – see this image of his titled Convergence.
These are a couple of examples – the one up top was shot with my iPhone 6 in burst mode (just hold down the shutter button). The others were shot with my Fujifilm X100T.
Just a little bit of silliness that I hope you enjoy!
Last fall, I attended a wonderful street photography workshop in Paris led by Valérie Jardin. On one of our morning walks, there had been a bit of rain overnight which provided a lovely sheen to the streets. By mid-day, it was gone and the day turned sunny and bright. Turned out to be one of the gifts – a morning after the rain with the payment still wet and the skies beginning to clear.
Last night I revisited this image to post-process it again. I’ve recently subscribed to Lynda.com and yesterday watched one of the courses about Photoshop taught by Adobe’s Bryan O’Neil Hughes in which he revisited many old techniques and brought to light new and better ways to do things. As I watched his lessons, I was using this image as my test case. One of the points he stresses is using a non-destructive workflow in Photoshop – something I’ve not been doing but will certainly make much more use of in the future. With this image, I’ve got all of the layers saved in the TIFF file which is now in Lightroom. At some point in the future, I’ll come back to it – and continue a bit more post-processing doing some dodging and burning through luminosity masks.
I’m having fun revisiting Paris as I post-process this particular image. It was a quick “grab shot” at the time I took it – as I had fallen behind our group and was trying to catch up. Sometimes it’s better to be lucky – this was one of those times!
Summer in San Francisco is always unpredictable weather-wise. Mark Twain’s famous quote is the the “The coldest winter I ever spent was a summer in San Francisco.” It’s always about the fog – and whether it’s dominating the local weather – or whether an onshore high pressure area is keeping the fog at bay.
Today was one of those beautiful summer days in San Francisco – where the two were roughly in balance. There was fog offshore along the coast but it was clear over The City. These kinds of days make for a delightful time – not the coolish foggy overcast but also not an overly warm day either. In other words, just perfect.
I got a late start this morning heading up to meet my friend Doug Kaye – deciding to meet up at 101 California and then heading to one of our favorites for lunch: Tadich Grill. This classic San Francisco restaurant continues to delight – great food at great prices served with attitude. I had the Ahi Tuna Salad special – and it just doesn’t get any better.
After lunch, Doug and I headed up California Street for some street photography. Couldn’t be much better than today!
It’s August – and we’re back out on the streets of San Francisco.
Here are a few images from last week’s photo walk with my good friend Doug Kaye. All shot with my Fujifilm X100T – except for that image up top which is an iPhone 6 shot.
The light is shifting – we can sense it and see it – and we’re looking forward to the sun dropping lower in the sky each day into the fall. We love those shadows – in interesting light!
The reflections of light continue to capture our interest. We’ve become “explorers of light” – as we turn each corner, our eyes quickly assess the quality of the light – and we move in where it’s great and move on where it’s not.
Turns out that there’s nothing much better in life than getting out on the streets of San Francisco – with a favorite camera in hand, walking with a good friend, sharing a great meal, and digesting the results!
Enjoy the rest of your summer!
Composition – and subsequent cropping (if we choose to cheat a bit) – really shapes the images we capture on the street. Sometimes, rarely, it’s empty space that makes the composition.
This is a recent example – shot at Vinton and Grant Avenue in San Francisco with my Fujifilm X-T1 – and, I’ll admit, cropped to perfect.
The focus of the image is the woman moving into the doorway on the left edge. But the empty space – and the dramatic light – really fill the frame. The No Parking sign on the right really anchors that side of the image.
I opted to leave the image in color instead of converting to monochrome. I found the colors of the wall on the left, the woman and the street shadows added a lot to the image. In monochrome, without the colors, the empty space seemed too overwhelming.
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