Last day in Tokyo

Back in July I spent a week in Tokyo. On my last day, I met up with my buddy Steve who lives near Mt. Fuji. Steve showed me around Shinjuku, Akibahara, and some other neighborhoods. We went to a festival for some fireworks and were rained on. Some rando put their fingers on my 31mm FA Limited's lens on accident. I ate the most incredible street food and octopus I've ever tried.


Before Steve arrived, I had about an hour to ram around Shinjuku and stumble into a Nikon shop. It was pretty great as I'd never seen one of the Canon f0.95 "Dream Lens" lenses before. After Steve arrived, he showed me all the great camera stores in Shunjuku. I wish I had bought some cameras. I wanted to but, for some reason, decided against it. Yes. Worst decision of the trip.


At Shinjuku Station, they had some mascots.


And somewhere in Tokyo this Panda waited for its owner to leave a store.


After some hours, we ended up at a festival. I forget what for, but there were fireworks over the river, too. A good portion of the people dressed in traditional Japanese garments.


Tradition mixed with modernity.


Steve and I were not the only photographers there. This girl from Hong Kong had a Holga.


Steve and I seemed, for a while, to be the only people NOT shooting medium format. I really liked this guy's Bronica. Beautiful camera.


And a giant lantern. I could have easily gone through two more rolls of film at the festival but everyone kept asking me to take their photos. Literally, they left everyone around me alone. Steve, who speaks Japanese, said someone said they thought I was a professional. I guess a lot of people heard that.


After deciding to take photos of things other than other people with their cameras, Steve and I were herded by a cop with a megaphone almost as big as him. It's pretty great.


And we stopped for octopus. Totally worth the 15-minute wait. I wanted more. I want to fly back to Tokyo and walk around until I find this place and have more.


Unfortunately, I don't have any fireworks photos because it rained. Hard. It was all Steve and I could do to keep our gear from getting wet. In the subway, we watched a few trains leave to get shots of how insanely crowded they were.


The cops tolerated us. Mostly.

I'm a K Man.

Pentax has a long history of revolutionizing photography. The Asahiflex and Spotmatic cameras were among the most innovative and creative SLRs of their day. The 6X7 remains one of the highest-quality medium format cameras available with an array of high-quality lenses. The MZ-S, LX, and MX also represent the best of Pentax and cameras that rival or out-compete their peers at Olympus, Minolta, Nikon, and Canon. The KM was never a marquis camera. It differs from the K1000 in the number of options, having also a depth of field preview, self timer, second flash sync, and film indicator. Other than that, it's mechanically and functionally about the same as the K1000. The four K series cameras -- K1000, KM, KX, and K2 -- were great for their time and remain highly usable and durable SLRs.

I definitely don't use my KM enough. Here are some reasons why I should use it more -- it sings with the kit 50mm 1:2 lens.


1/1,000th, f5.6
These are vertical concrete bars on a parking garage. At an angle, with lucky lighting, and the fortune of a yellow filter that matched -- exactly -- the wavelength range reflected by the yellow-painted bars, this image became something highly dramatic, very 1950's suspense film-ish.


This is stitched together from three images. Each were taken at 1/1,000th, f22.


1/1,000th, f5.6


Apple is eating the world in 2012. WWDC stands for WorldWide DevourCon.
1/125th, f11


Let's end with a contrast test. Here are the same images at different aperture settings. Notice as we descend that the images become less contrasty. Fascinating.
1/250th, f11


1/60th, f16


1/1,000th, f2.8

How to get Yelled at by a Hobo

San Francisco has a LOT of homeless people. Mostly, they keep to themselves. Sometimes, however, they decide not to. Now, let me first preface this by saying that in eight months of daily trips to SF, this is the first interaction I've had with a hobo that is in any way close to negative. Most are quite, many friendly, even. Last Monday, though , I had one yell at me for taking pictures of the Embarcadero and the artwork on it.

It ended uneventfully. I had crouched to take a couple photos of a column. The hobo began yelling about it being illegal to photograph people. First off, young photographers reading this post, photographing people on the street is in fact NOT illegal in the U.S. There's neither a right nor expectation of privacy. That is if those people are on the street. Now, if you're standing there with your camera and photographing inside someone's home, well, I'm pretty sure that's illegal. And you'd deserve to die in a fire if you did that. Just saying.

So this hobo begins yelling at me and threatening to go buy a video camera and record me photographing things. I stood up, looked at him, and said "yeah, okay." He may not have realized, while I was crouching, that I'm 6'4". He decided to drop the issue and left basically in a run. Want to see the photo he yelled at me for taking?



1/1,000th, f8.
Technically it has people. I framed this shot terribly. My hope was to have the blocks be 1/4 of the final frame each and the blurry street scene the other half. The rest of my evening stroll was lovely and uneventful. Here are some more photos from the day.


1/60th, f4.
"Sir, please, kind sir, I was washed up on the sidewalk here by a big wave. Can you please carry me back to the water?" the turtle said as I walked past.
"Can I take your photo first? It's not every day one meets a talking tortoise."
"Yes, and technically I'm a sea turtle. Tortoises live on land, have big shells. See my hydrodynamic shell? I'm purpose-built for the water."
"Uh-huh." I took the photo, knowing now why no one had taken the sea turtle back to the water. No one wants to save a sarcastic sea turtle, just the cute and quiet ones that come ashore to lay their eggs and not bother people. And, heck, as a civilization we can't really bring ourselves to save those sea turtles. What chance do the sarcastic ones have? "Well, thank you very much for that. Let's get you to the water." I picked up the turtle and began walking toward my Muni stop."
"Sir, kind sir, I don't mean to be a pest, but the water is that way."
"The bay is that way, sure, but you didn't specify the bay. I guess you should have been more specific. The water you're going to is in a pot at my house." I'm glad to report that silly sarcastic turtle soup is just as tasty as the cute and quiet turtle soup.


1/1,000th, f4.
Quebec Libre!


1/60th, f11.
More of Quebec Libre!


1/125th, f5.6
And, like this gull, it's time for me to fly away.

K1000 Noir

I love my K1000. It was my first SLR and together we still work very well. I'm looking forward to sending it off for repair in September, though. I needs a good CLA and a meter calibration. You'll see that some of these shots were a bit over-exposed. The batteries may be a bit weak, too, though.

But the K1000 is a camera I know well and we work together as a fairly effective team, often. It's the simplest SLR that I know of and a reliable, well-built favorite. And with as well as I know this camera, it should be no surprise that I had a pretty good day with it.

1/60th, f5.6
The sculpture 'Annular Eclipse.'

1/60th, f8

1/125th, f2.8
"I'm coming to get you," said the fiberglass grime reaper, in a voice tht sounded of insulation inside a boat hull.

1/125th, f2.8
"Who, me?" asked the bystander. (That's actually me. I'm playing the role of The Bystander in today's play.)

1/30th, f8
"Uh, well, no. Not you by name. You don't work for this company we're here picketing, do you? Well then, no not you. Here's a flier."

I don't get much into labor and union disputes on this blog. I've gotten to hear about them at two of my three career employers, and they're politically charged and this is an art blog, not a politics blog. So, in short, I won't go into details about who was doing the picketing or who was being picketed. I also did not get the guys' card, so I can't help you order one of these.

This was one of those union street displays that the unions use to draw attention to firms that use less-expensive workers. The guy there explained how it's made and how popular it's been across the U.S., requiring that even more be made. If I remember correctly, there are now 30 of these grim reapers around the western U.S. for use in pickets and such. It turns out they originally made these of papier machet, and then one of the other unions liked it and asked for one, so they made a mold and began producing them in fiberglass. The mold, as you might imagine, has to be very complex due to the multiple pieces involved in each component. It's built around a steel frame, but the whole thing comes apart to fit inside a pickup truck bed.

1/1000th, f2.8

1/250th, f2.8
I dig this little Tokina a lot. This lens and my now-fungus-infested Nikon Tokina SZ-X 28-200 give me a great deal of respect for Tokina lenses. My only complaint about this lens is the dramatic light drop-off at the corners. This image is a bit cropped, so that effect isn't so obvious. Wait till the next few images for a better example.

1/60th, f5.6
This image shows, a little, the light drop-off at the corners. That happens with lenses, and wide-angles are very susceptible to it. Typically, that's not really an issue and with this lens it doesn't so much bother me.

This image also shows how incredibly sharp this lens it. Check out the glove's palm and all the cracks in the vinyl.

1/250th, f2.8

Typically, I like to end on a bright, cheery image that will make everyone's day better. Well, no dice this time. Here's a truly sad image that should make most people wail in dismay. I don't often title my pictures, but this one I call "She Ain't Pretty no More."

1/250th, f5.6

SRT on the Docks

I took my Minolta SRT 102 and the Tamron 28-70 north of the Ferry Building, an area I've never walked to before. No sinister reason, but why walk when there are antique trolleys?



1/60th, f6.3


1/125th, f11
From a technical perspective, the first image is clearly the better. However, I like the drama that the second image, with its non-vertical verticals and dark sky, creates. The first image nicely frames away the neighboring buildings, focusing just on that one apartment complex. The second image includes hints of the neighborhood. I admit I like the framing on the first image better.



1/125th, f11


1/60th, f11
After taking some shots of the building, as practice for the portfolio I'm developing, I wandered around. I love the old Milan trolleys, two photos above, for their look, but not so much for their noise. If you've never ridden one, it's like riding inside the acoustic equivalent of a rock tumbler -- it's loud. But they also have the nicest interiors of San Francisco's classic trolleys -- wood and large windows. This dock was where I finished my roll. The above shot includes some additional photo processing besides contrast balance to correct for scanner flatness and sharpening. The deck had some gamma reduction to enhance the grain.


1/30th, f22.
I was lucky with this shot. The dock was extremely windy and many of my shots at 1/60th turned out too blurry to use on this blog. However, this shot turned out decently well despite the slow shutter speed and high wind. This is downtown San Francisco with Embarcadero Center in the middle (the tall, dark building and two similarly-shaped buildings to its right) and a bunch of other buildings I don't know the name of.

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.

A Geriatric Gets a New Life

I bought my Pentax H3V for $11.13 broken at a camera shop in SF with the specific intent of having it repaired so I could make sure that my Pentaxes, which I like a great deal, would be safe and well repaired by the repair shop. In short, the repair was perfect, the camera looks and works great, and I'll be gladly sending each of my Pentaxes to the shop for repairs and servicing. A lot of them would benefit from new light seals and such anyway.

So to fully test the H3V, I went to the Civic Center and ran three rolls of film through it. Foma 400, Walgreens 400, and Kodak BWCN400. My goal had been to photograph Henry Moore's 1973 sculpture "Large Four Piece Reclining Figure" which is outside the symphony hall. That accomplished, I walked around the Civig center photographing things until it looked like I may be stabbed.



THis is the sculpture. I didn't see the reclining figure, either, until I got closer.


Just a reference image with the sculpture name, artist, and year.


Taking this shot, which was number 21 of 27, was when I first began to see the sculpture as a reclining figure. Either I took a while to learn, or the sculptor did something wrong. You may decide for yourself.


A closer version of the previous shot. One of my two favorites from this trip.


Inside the sculpture.


From this angle, it looks like the reclining figure is smiling. I'd be smiling, too, if I could recline all the time.


My other favorite photo.


One nice thing about this piece is that because it's so open shadows move around and through it freely. This presents interesting photographic possibilities.






After finishing the roll, I decided to meander around the area. Not too far, mind you, because it was getting dusk-ish and I look like a victim.




Rendered in color, this moving, inflated flower sculpture is interesting. It's not my favorite, so I'm glad it won't be a permanent addition to the area. It doesn't quite fit the area Zeitgeist, which is all metal and such.


I also walked up to the San Francisco Public Utilities Corporation Building, which opens soon. THis will be a LEED Platinum building. It's gorgeous from any angle (except up close, at least until the construction crews wash the windows of the construction dust.)


I actually used almost the entire Walgreen 400 color roll on this building, but figured you don't want to see 18 variations on the same shot. So here's a different one.


And another different one.

After finishing the color roll, I decided to try the BWCN400 on the inflatable sculpture and see if maybe some up-close shots would change my opinion. Well, not so much. I should have done these shots with color because the sky and the red rendered too close to make the images truly dramatic. They may have been dramatic had I had a deep red filter or more color film. I did have my K-7 on me, but, as I stated above, I look like a victim.



See, in monochrome it just doesn't work, not without some special handling, which I lacked the equipment for.


This sculpture I get and all, but I'm no fan. My take on this piece is that it strives to show life through movement in sculpture. Additionally hinted at because it's a flower. And it's bright red which makes it very noticeable. And it's quite, which is nice. But I can't get into it even though, I think, I like the purpose and intent.


Lest you assert that I dislike kinetic art -- I admit I think it's a bit gimmicky sometimes -- here is a piece of kinetic sculpture that isn't on my thumbs-down list. It's across the street from where the flower is. It's two "L"s and they move in the wind. Nifty.

In short, what did I learn this week? The H3V and Sears Focal 28mm works very well together. I'm not sure who made the Focal lens, but it was made in Japan. I read some posts online with speculation as to who, therefore, made it, but I'm not sold on this being a Tokina. Sun Optics, maybe. Anyway, it's a fabulous lens and cooperates with the H3V quite nicely.

Also I learned not to carry extra film with me. It takes about two minutes per image to scan these. So multiply that by 25 for a normal day and you'll see it takes me about five hours to scan all the images for a given week. Then I have to edit them and downsample them for Internet hosting. These images you see are about 150-225 kilobytes each. The originals on my hard drive are 3.6 to 6.5 megabytes each. I'd run out of Picasa space in a month! So, it takes about another 30 to 45 minutes to contrast balance, sharpen, and remove developing flaws (e.g., a piece of hair) from the negatives before uploading them. So when I do something like take two extra rolls of film, it adds about three hours to my weekend scanning and editing routine. That doesn't make my girlfriend or my dogs happy. So, lesson learned, stick to the one-roll-per-day thing.