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

Continuing from yesterday, after walking the long quay at Fisherman's wharf, I strolled up to Fort Mason. There's a statue of there of Congressman Phillip Burton that I wanted to photograph. From the quay, there's a path up a hill along the water. Part of this blog's job is to share interesting things as well as attractive or interesting photos. So here's one of the interesting things along the way: A wind pole.

At the wind pole's base is this sign explaining what it is. When one looks up it, this is what one sees:


I took two other shots, but this is the most dramatic. A second or two earlier, ans I could have caught many of the arrows pointing in completely different directions. Watching it for a few minutes, the arrows moved periodically in patterns, moved into sinusoidal waves by air currents moving off the ocean and into the hills.


This images was actually taken a bit earlier, by maybe three minutes, so it's out of order. Oh well.


Also an out-of-order image, this was captured with a similar technique to the monochrome version I shared yesterday. What's going to be interesting is the next image. Both were taken at different apertures. I believe this was around f38 (the smallest aperture of any lens I've ever used) and the next was around f16.


The most obvious difference is the blue cast. I know I've made this promise before, but at some point I will actually write a blog about why that happens -- or at least why I think that happens.

And thus I ended up at the statue of Congressman Philip Burton. One of my goals on this walk was to do a study of this statue and I captures somewhere north of 20 images. I found the sculpture's hands fascinating and very lifelike. Also, the interplay between the hands and face -- specifically through the pose. This statue is forever in debate or speech-giving. It is a great statue and an asset to San Francisco's art community. So the remaining pictures will be a study of this statue.

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.