Saturday Night Special

Last week I got a long walk around downtown San Francisco. I brought my K-7 and an autofocus 35-80mm lens. I didn't want to muss about with manual focusing. Since you can check the exif data if you're so inclined to see the photo info, I'll dispense with it. I'm also going to skip the post-processing details. In short, the buildings received perspective corrections. And now, a string of photos from San Francisco and their titles, when applicable.


Thoughtful in Union Square


Reflecting on San Francisco




Tea Time




Drum solo






And... let's end big. Monkey, play us out.

Classical Guitar Jukebox Monkey

Indoors at Westfield

I took the Super Travenar indoors on Wednesday because the weather was terrible for photography, as noted in yesterday's post. But I also had color film in the K1000, so with the scans worth keeping I had to compensate for the fluorescent tinging in the curves function. I raised the blue (especially the light blues) and dropped the greens. So all of these photos had the same post-processing, some color correction.


1/30th, f2.8. Tea for sale at Lupicia. Smell the teas then bring the cards to the salesperson. The teas provide an olfactory bonanza. Harsh, fruity, wine-scented, the teas provide diversity far beyond expectation. The K1000 did not enjoy metering with the Travenar. Perhaps because it doesn't fit in the Pentax adapter exactly correctly, the meter kept giving me wildly false reading, such as one-second exposures wide-open outside. I need to try yet another new battery in that camera.


12 seconds, f22. I totally guessed at these settings, but seem to have been pretty much spot-on. I tried a number of escalator long-duration exposures but the others were all double exposed. I think I had my finger on the rewind sprocket release while advancing the film. Oops. Well, that's a whole series of photos I can go back and take again when I run out of tea.
I like how the escalator looks like a solid belt, like a moving walkway on a slant. Man would it be fun to have a slanted moving walkway. I want one in my house.


Full-second exposure, f11 or f8, not sure if this was the first or second shot I took of the same subject.


I'm not sure which architect designed this mall, but I love this view. They did well with this open space.

Lessons learned today:
1- Invest in some fluorescent color-correcting filters if I plan to use color film inside ever again.

Union Square and The Embarcadero in Color and Monochrome

One of my favorite cameras is my Nikon F3. I got it for free on Craig's List along with a Tamron 28-200 zoom lens. I don't use the Tamron lens that often due to its weight and penchant for vignetting below 35mm, but it is a superior piece of glass. I had to unpack it at the airport one time because the x-ray machines couldn't see into it. But for this outing, part of the same trip I took to SOMA near Hayes Valley, I had my F3 and the Nikon 43-86mm zoom lens. I took four rolls of film, Foma 400 ISO, Foma 100 ISO, and two Fuji Superia 400 ISO rolls. The Fuji turned out alright, but the colors were off. These were the other two rolls processed at the same time as the Spotmatic rolls, in old chemicals. The ten shots below are the best from this trip.


This isn't the first time I've photographed these guys; these shots turned out better but are a bit less interesting than last time. With the F3, I'm never entirely sure of the shutter speed because I have to keep it on automatic and the screen that tells me the shutter speed is dead. It felt like about 1/125th, though, as did most of these. Some may have been 1/60th and 1/30th. For aperture values, between 3.5 (mostly) and 5.6.

If you're ever in Union Square and see these guys, they're worth watching for a bit. They don't do hyper-athletic dancing, generally, but can bend into odd and strange positions.


If you checked out the other album, you'll notice that in those shots this guy's hair appears dark and uniform. It is, however, bright red. For the first album I had a green lens filter, this time a red. Filters warrant their own blog post some day, but for now let's discuss how they work in principle.

Filters can correct film deficiencies or cause specific effects. In fact, checking a film's visual spectrum will help you select a good filter to use. Foma, for instance, works brilliantly with yellow filter. This Foma had a red filter and performed well given the weather.

Filters work not by tinting everything a color but by removing certain light spectra. All visible light is either red, green, blue (RGB), or a mixture thereof. So placing a red filter on the camera allows more of the red spectrum through to the film, by percentage, and cuts the green and blue spectra. So a red filter is not a red additive filter but a green and blue cut filter. This results in red tones being lightened with green and blue tones being darkened. The green filter lightens green by cutting blue and red. So, this guy's hair appears blonde in these photos because the red filter artificially lightened it. In the earlier ones it appeared dark because the green filter artificially darkened it. More on how that works when I write a post dedicated to filters.


The weather on 12-30 in San Francisco presented substantial photographic challenges. Extremely overcast skies can ruin otherwise fine monochrome photos because they lack the shadows and color vibrancy otherwise present. Yes, I said color vibrancy. Black and white film sees color, just without all the colory-ness. I'll write a blog about how that works, too, but need to get some different film histograms, first.

The point of that is that many of these results are very grainy. Also, they could be grainy because the developer was nearing the end of its useful life. I did some photo editing on this shot. In the upper left corner I replicated the pavement to remove some peoples' legs. I found them distracting.


This is the last of the dancer/contortionist photos. I just like how it's framed, so I thought I would include it.


This guy is super friendly and plays cast iron pans pretty well and with a lot of enthusiasm. He also performs in Union Square. I suggest giving him a buck or two if you see him out there.

This was taken on Fuji Superia 400. I suspect the shutter speed was about 1/60th. However, my camera shake indicates that it could have been 1/30th. Either way, the aperture was f3.5.


After union Square I walked down Market to Battery to see the worker's statue. This is one of my favorite statues in San Francisco. The sculpture is interesting and the craftsmanship fantastic. However, none of the photos from that statue turned out well. I had 100 ISO film in the F3 then and all the shutter speeds were 1/15th or slower. So all the shots are blurry and shaky. After giving up on that, I walked north on Battery to the 307 building where this nifty bronze statue stands out front. I'm not sure what it's supposed to be, but I like it. I post-processed this to emphasize the bronze running from the eyes like tears. I accomplished that by darkening the dark areas to increase detail and depth (using the magic wand with an affinity of 32 and non-contiguous masking, followed by a feather of 35 or 45, layer pasting, and an offset increase of some amount.) Afterward, I did the same basic process on the 'tears' and increased the offset. For both pasted layers I dropped the transparency to 20% to hide the feathering and because the offset was fairly extreme in each direction.

This shot was 1/8th or 1/15th of a second with the camera braced and pressed against a building column for stability. It's never a good idea to carry a tripon unless one is absolutely needed. They're bulky, heavy, and a sign that someone has a camera worth stealing. In all those ways, they label you "VICTIM." In addition, some cities require a permit to photograph with a tripod and the fines can be hefty ($250 in New York, for instance) even if you're an amateur. So, for shots of 1/15th or faster, bring a walking stick with a tripod ball on the handle. This doubles as a monopod and provide some stability. Or, make sure you're aware of your surroundings and look or places to brace your camera -- such as a building wall, bench, or sign.


Just north of that statues about 50 feet is a staircase around a bronze globe. This is underneath that staircase. Braced against a concrete planter or seat thing, 1/4 second exposure or thereabouts.


Inside the Embarcadero center is an escalator I photographed before, but from off-center. Some lady was leaning against a pamphlet display thing and didn't see the need to move to let me take a picture. So, I decided being nearby that I would try again. This time, the guy who was at the display thing saw I was lining up a photo and waiting to read into the display until I was done. I needed the display thing to brace the photo since the exposure was at least 1/2 second. This shot was not that shot directly. For this I dropped the gamma and pasted the black areas on as a separate layer. I changed the black to dark blue, resulting in the black pixels over lighter pixel showing as blue. To the guy who let me take this photo, thank you. I'm pleased by the result.


After leaving the Embarcadero center, beaconed by the calls of parrots, I ended up in a park I didn't catch the name of. I had no lens for photographing parrots 35 feet up trees, but there was a statue commemorating the U.S. and South Korean peace something or another. This is one of the shots of that statue, a shot into the 'links.' This was taken at f11 with the camera braced against the sculpture. The exposure was about 1/2 second or longer.


For this last photo, I looked out the BART doors and saw the sun setting behind this BoA building. I hopped out, lined it up, and grabbed this shot. Hand-held at 1/30th, f4. I turned around, watched the BART doors close, and the train take off without me. That said, the shto was completely worth it. And fortunately I didn't leave anything on the train, either.

Union Square, San Francisco, 22 December 2011. Pentax K1000, Tokina 28mm, Ilford PanF 50 ISO

As I posted yesterday, I'm going to try and do something with this blog this year. For my first post, I'm going to look at my photos from 22 December 2011 and discuss how I achieved various effects (not that the answer will typically be luck.) In terms of Photoshop, I will limit post processing to contrast balance and gamma (contrast) enhancement. Anything more intense will be noted. For this blog, we'll look at some photos from this album:https://picasaweb.google.com/102333270936007447976/SF122211

for this trip, I used a Pentax K1000, Tokina 28mm lens with a green filter, and Ilford PanF 50 ISO film. PanF 50 ISO is the slowest monochrome film available, meaning the exposure times are relatively long (up to 1/15th of a second in sunlight.) Since I don't typically carry a tripod, that meant holding my camera very still. This first shot, inside Westfield Mall, was a 1/4 or a 1/8 second exposure, hand-held, braced against a column.

Ilford PanF 50 is a high-contrast film with little or no use forgiveness. Errors are amplified, but so too are photo qualities. This shot achieved a reasonable tonal balance despite the bright center and very shaded periphery. To enhance this shot, I used the magic wand grabber in the center (sensitivity 55) and feathered the grab at 65 pixels. I then pasted the grab and dropped the gamma to about .15. From there, I made the layer opacity about 55% to bring out some of the center areas tones. The grab was just the white oval in the middle, none of the levels.

While in union Square, a contortionist troupe performed a series of hip-hip-ish moves that combined beautiful movement with grotesquery. Turning arms on the horizontal axis, shoulders that looked as though placed by blunt force, they twisted like bottle corkscrews. These shots were all wide open (f2.8) at either 1/30th or 1/60th of a second.

The green filter darkened this performer's hair, which was bright-cherry-red. In Photoshop, I added gamma to his torso to amplify muscle tone. The process was similar to that described above, but with 75% opacity.

A better vantage point would have been about 1.3 the circle counterclockwise to prevent the sun from throwing off the K1000's meter. A problem with wide-angle lenses, they accept more light than reaches the film plane, which affect through-the-lens metering. With ultra-wide-angle lenses, such as an 8mm or 10mm fisheye, photographers need to stop down the lenses up to two full stops to compensate for light affects on camera metering.

In addition to shots which worked, many of this roll's shots failed. The usable album (the link above), presents 12 photos. The roll, 27 exposures, yielded 15 failures not worth scanning and uploading. Some were salvageable, though, these next shots will show how to take failed exposures and return reasonable results.

This shot was more than 60% washed out. The general grayness in the negative space (white area) indicates that the shot's overall exposure was dropped in Photoshop. In addition, three time I magic wanded the white space (sensitivity of 55) and feathered the margins (95 pixels, 65 pixels, 45 pixels) and pasted the new layer. Each time I dropped the gamma to .2 or .3 and the opacity to 45% or less. After each layer, I flattened the image to facilitate the repeated process. At the end, I did an auto contrast and called it a day. The result is not spectacular, though. Fortunately, it wasn't a very good shot anyway.

This shot had a few flaws. The whole shot was whitewashed like a picket fence, which required three or four gamma-drop layers. The light post was exceedingly dark, so I copied it (magic wand and feathering, as described) and increased the gamma significantly. Making the opacity 50% made the lamp post details pop pretty well.

An aesthetic decision, the lamp post had a no parking sign. I copied a segment from above, pasted it over the sign, and then did a free transform process to make it the same width and alter the skew slightly to keep the lines in parallel. If you look very closely, about 1/3rd of the way up the lamp post, you can see where the two layers met and don't match quite perfectly (check the right side.)

More to come soon!