Last Monday took me literally all over southeast San Francisco -- Dogpatch, SOMA, Downtown, and Embarcadero. I was testing out my new Tokina 35-70 AF on my K-7, and here are some results.
Graffiti on some old doors. Blur on the right side is the chain-link fence between me and the building.
As one of my friends observed: "Regardless of its artistic merits, someone still has to pay to clean it up."
While I was documenting some buildings' conditions, I decided to grab some shots of the architectural details, too. Once abrasive blasted and repainted with only one coat, these could be promising details.
Dodged the highlights and burned the shadows to emphasize depth and contrast.
I enjoy photographing mannequins because they're like sculptures but also because Picasa keeps trying to get me to tag them.
This photo's point is not the foreground mannequin, but the background reflection, which looks very unhappy and ominous. To achieve the desired look, I modified some color and contrasts to amplify the reflection's presence.
Converted to monochrome in Photoshop with the levels adjusted to make the sculpture look more gritty than it actually is. It's still plenty mucked up by rain and salt, though.
Same sculpture as above, Mistral, by Elbert Weinberg. This sculpture represents the warm winds that originate in Africa and move into Europe,
according to the Embarcadero Center's sculpture tour website. I thought it was a fish.
Mistral and the Hyatt.
Mistral in color. This photo shows how I arrived at the above images. By removing color, the colors in this image became lights or dark, resulting in a textured look. Make the yellows light or dark and the image takes on a different character. Combine that with light or dark reds, blues, cyan, magenta, and greens, and the image has hundreds of thousands of different appearances.
