That title is a quote from Winston Churchill that seemed just right for this image from Havana last year! He’s got attitude!
From the farmer’s market in Havana, this fellow was selling produce – and bathed in the beautiful light coming in from the higher windows behind.
There’s a wonderful carousel tucked away upstairs in the Moscone Center complex in downtown San Francisco.
Here’s a shot taken with my tiny Canon PowerShot S100 back in April 2012 – a tweaked just a bit in Lightroom 5.
Forever young!
Two years ago this week we took a one day workshop at Point Reyes with photographer Marty Knapp.
I tried to emphasize the range of tonality in this image – using a combination of adjustments. I captured it with my Canon 5D Mark II and processed in Lightroom 5 and Photoshop CC using Nik’s Silver Efex Pro 2.
This image brings back a lot of memories for me – it was a wonderful day we spent with Marty.
My photo buddy Doug Kaye and I recently visited San Francisco’s Exploratorium in their new location at Pier 15 along San Francisco’s Embarcadero.
Among the many hands-on exhibits inside, there are a couple fascinating mirror-based exhibits – including the one I used for this photo.
Shot with my Fujifilm X-E2, and processed in Lightroom 5, this image was a lot of fun to shoot.
Following on from yesterday’s “The Leader” image, here’s another example from our visit to Havana, Cuba last January. Also shot with my Nikon D600. I’ve been experimenting with some new techniques for monochrome conversion using a new action being developed by Dan Margulis as some other special tricks.
Here’s the before image:
This is one of my favorite images from our trip to Cuba a year ago this week. It’s a shot of the lead singer in the band the night we were at Cafe Taberna – which plays that wonderful Ry Cooder / Buena Vista Social Club style of music. By the end of the evening, the band had us on our feet with lots of folks dancing in the aisles. Such a great memory!
I re-processed this image last night and uploaded it to Flickr. Today, it got picked up by Flickr Explore and went viral – resulting in thousands of page views and many new followers to my Flickr photostream. Pretty amazing to watch! The re-processing I did last night primarily involved a new Photoshop action being worked on by Dan Margulis which does some magic to portrait shots. I then processed it into monochrome in two steps – first using Nik’s Silver Efex Pro 2 and then applied a platinum gradient map to give a gentler look to the monochrome treatment.
If you’re curious, here’s the original image straight out of the camera – my Nikon D600:
San Francisco’s Embarcadero Center is one of our favorite spots – the architecture is amazing. There are several of these beautiful spiral staircases in the various buildings – here’s one that’s on the inside. I shot the image with my Fujifilm X-E2.
For this image, I chose to focus on the structure and the lighting – emphasizing the color and the texture. I processed it first in Lightroom 5 and then pulled it into Photoshop CC for further adjustments of the shadows/highlights and a bit of simplification using Topaz Simplify 4. A final touch of the oil paint filter kicked up the texture on the tiles.
Back in Lightroom, I used the split toning panel to change the highlight and shadow colors to a more cinematic (orange-ish highlights/blue-ish shadows) to further bring out the colors.
I’m enjoying the oil paint filter in Photoshop CC – especially when used on images like this with the brickwork and texture. I enjoy how it can add a touch of additional texture to an image.
There are some wonderful alleys in San Francisco – some filled with cafes like The Irish Bank. They’re worth exploring further. I keep telling Doug Kaye that we need to write the book: “The Stages of San Francisco”. The second in that series should be “The Alleys of San Francisco”. Great places for street photography is a great city.
This image was shot with my Fujifilm X-E2 and post-processed in Lightroom 5 with VSCO Film before tweaking with the oil paint filter in Photoshop CC.
Here’s another image from our recent street photography photo walk in San Francisco. After meeting at the Ferry Building, we caught a quick Uber ride up to San Francisco’s Union Square. Lots of people and activity.
As we started out, the Powell and Hyde Street cable cars began moving quite frequently up and down Powell St. We had some interesting mid-morning January light and tried to find a spot that might work out sort of as a stage.
This is one of my shots – taken with my Fujifilm X-E2 and post-processed in Lightroom 5 and Photoshop CC.