The Tourist Thing

After work Friday I decided to do the tourist thing and walk from the Levi Strauss Plaza up the Filbert Stairs to Coit Tower and back. While up Telegraph Hill, I also went up Coit Tower. In sum, a nice walk and gorgeous day for some nice views.


1/8th, f22. Capturing water flow over a few seconds can make water look fantastic in photographs. Water with slight ripples become smooth. Waterfalls become curtains. Fountains, well, they just don't become more interesting.


1/250th, f5.6. Lying in the fountain looking up at a tree branch.


1/60th, f16. I admit I don't get the block nor what it has to do with jeans, unless the rock and water represent stone washing. Who knows. It's nifty, though.


1/125th, f29. Arches adorning the top of Coit Tower.


1/125th, f32. Slightly grainy because the window was dirty.


1/60th, f16. Oops. The negative was touching the negative in front of it. I could repair that in Photoshop and, someday, I may. But this is why it's important to be careful when loading film onto reels.


1/125h, f11. Downtown San Francisco.

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.

Graffiti, Sculpture, and Mannequins

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.