A Year in Photos

Photography, fiction, and personal essays form my three primary creative outlets. For this blog's first 18 months, I used it primarily for photography. As I've returned to creative writing, I'll use this blog for fiction, too. Sometimes, when reality needs to be discussed more than truth, I write personal essays.

This blog will continue to showcase as many above-average photos as I can muster. Hopefully my written work will be as good or better than the visual. Whichever drew you here -- photographs or fiction, I hope you enjoy both.
Showing posts with label Fisherman's Wharf. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Fisherman's Wharf. Show all posts

Sunday, June 3, 2012

My First Rolls with an N80 (Part 1 of 2)

As I mentioned a couple weeks ago, my girlfriend left her Nikon N80 here. So it's fair game to use. On May 25th I ran three rolls through it -- one Foma 400 and two Walgreens color 400. I'm going to break this trip into two posts (in the interest of having five bog entries this week) and share the monochrome images today and the color ones tomorrow.

Only nine of the monochrome images turned out. Three of the 24 images had unforgivably bad compositions. A couple the auto-focus had automatically focused on the wrong thing, and a bunch were redundant or boring. Of the nine that turned out, six are blog-worthy.


Along San Francisco's northern shores, near Ghiradelli square, is a long quay that wraps around the northernmost piers. THis quay provides some great views of the city, Alcatraz, and especially the Golden Gate Bridge. Here is a shot of the protected marina, backgrounded by Alcatraz.


Here is the Golden Gate Bridge. You'll notice this image looks like I used a red filter. However, I had no additional filters. To achieve this effect, I used the camera's matrix metering (or whatever Nikon called it back then) and grabbed a reading off the clouds. That forces the clouds, which the sun shone through, to be the middle tone (zone four or five on the zone scale.) The sky was comparatively darker, as was the water, yielding less light to the film during exposure. That resulted in this faux-red-filter look. A nice result, mostly.


A fisherman.


The view back toward Telegraph Hill and Coit Tower.


The San Francisco skyline.


Someone making great use of a lovely and windy day.

Tuesday, May 29, 2012

Great Lens, but Maybe not for me.

Last Tuesday I was supposed to take my Nikon F3 out. That didn't happen until Friday, so these are images I took Friday with the 105mm lens. The 105mm focal distance was difficult for me. Perhaps I was in a bad area for it, or perhaps it's just not a focal distance that I mesh with. Either way, I'll try it again in the future and see if I have better results.









Last Friday I also took my girlfriend's Nikon N80 with me, and that lens and camera combination yielded much better results. So we'll see those on Friday. Friday promises to be a long post.

Friday, April 20, 2012

K-7 Experimentation

When my K-7 returned from the repair shop the other week the repair team had installed the latest firmware version. At first I was unhappy because it reset all my settings -- which took me about two hours to undo -- but also included a new mode I don't recall my camera having before -- reversal film. It's a setting on the color mode menu. So I gave it a shot and it's cut my editing time by 50%. The colors are deeper, the contrasts improved. In short, this is how I edit my images to be. So I'm pleased. Here are some color results. All shot with my Takumar 50mm 1:1.4 (the other lens given to me for scanning slides.)




Both of these were shot wide-open to test this lens' capabilities at f1.4 Not shabby.


A frog outside of Rainforest Cafe at Fisherman's Wharf. To me it looks like the frog is going to eat children as though they were large flies.


That fence is still locked up tightly.


A sculpture at Foundry Square.


That same sculpture only just its reflection.


A sculpture at MacArthur BART. Looks to me like a pregnant chick about to pop one out.


Few things are lonelier than an abandoned bike.

Thursday, April 12, 2012

The Man with the Midas Touch



Alternate blog title: Gold Fingers.

"Do you expect me to talk?"
"No, Mr. Tog, I expect you to tip."