I think I had just gotten a close-up filter to replace the on-loan Canon 400D. We went to some Thai restaurant in nearby whose name I’ve since forgotten. When Marie’s sake order game, after staging it onto my side of the table, I used it as an opportunity to test out the new filter on my camera.
Sake
The Richmond, San Francisco, California
Nikon D3, Nikkor 24-70mm f/2.8G, Hoya Pro1 Digital MC Close-up +3
1/50sec @ ƒ2.8, iso 800, 29mm
Every summer, the Wikimedia Foundation sponsors a conference somewhere around the world that is ass-hot. This year, it was in Hong Kong. It’s a shame that I stopped photographing because there was so much to see.
Solar Woman and Darkman
Granville Road, Kowloon, Hong Kong
iPhone 5 + Pro HDR
1/140 sec @ f/2.4, iso 50, 4.13mm (33mm)
I had recently broken up and moved away from my girlfriend so I was spending time in a still-unpacked new temporary apartment, so I decided to take up some hobbies besides running or cycling. This meant cooking and drinking.
I decided to start mixing drinks again. It was best to start with the basics, and nothing is more basic than a classic dry martini. While my parents gin of choice was Beefeater, I’ve always been a fan of Bombay Sapphire—mostly just because of its distinctive blue bottle. If I start there and understand that presentation is the most important part of a drink, getting just the right martini glass to go along with it immediately follows.
I was toasting the close of an old life and the start of a new one. Odd that I had to down this drink alone at this watershed moment in my life, something I never do.
Sapphire martini
Mountain View, California
Panasonic DMC-LX1
1/20 sec at f/2.8, iso 200, 6.3mm (28mm)
I drove before sunrise from the South Bay to San Francisco this early morning in order to accomplish two things. One was to photograph a Christmas card to send to friends because of my newly-launched, just finished eCards for Plaxo. The other was just to see the legendary view from the east peak of Mt. Tam.
On the drive back, I pulled over to the side of the road and took some handheld photos of which this is one. I liked this angle because from here you can see both the skyline and the Golden Gate Bridge in the frame, while still having enough foreground to show the distance and frame the photograph.
Morning fog hits San Francisco
Mt Tamalpais, Marin, California
Granny G’s burger with egg Boxing Room, Hayes Valley, San Francisco, California
Apple iPhone 5
1/20sec @ f/2.4, iso1600 4.13mm (33 mm)
This was after going to the symphony. I guess I was hungry because I asked for a fried egg to be put on top of it.
Since this project came up and only had iPhone images, I thought I’d use a non-Camera+ iPhone image as as an opportunity to investigate Lightroom CC’s de-noise and sharpening routines (in the Detail tab of the Develop module). While it is very convenient, I dislike the artifacts it generates when working on underexposed JPEG images.
Surprisingly, a simple application of basic processing, seems to oversaturate the reds in image, which I had to pull down using the HSL controls. I guess Adobe engineers are Canon photographers.
In Lightroom’s defense, the lighting was terrible, so I should be happy anything was usable, as there’s only so much you can recover from a high ISO photo camera shot. Should learn to bring a real camera out when I eat.
The end of my much-beloved Aperture and the start of a new year means a migration to Adobe Lightroom CC is in order. The Python developer who coded the Aperture import plugin for Adobe was clearly underpaid as it is underperforming and crash-prone when you have an Aperture Library as corrupted as mine.
So after a week of failure upon hard disk failure, upon Aperture Vault recovery, upon backups and more backups (lesson learned). I’ve resigned myself to moving one project at a time into Lightroom. But which project?
For that, I wrote a simple Applescript that selects a random project. And then I move it, verify the map, redo the face detection, and fix the keywords. As a reward, I process and post an image from it and hopefully write a little something. You’ve noticed a few over the last week, and this will continue for…
(If I manage a project a day, it’ll be a couple years before I’ve fully migrated. Such is what happens when you’ve been shooting digitally for over 16 years.)
…
Jonathan Abrams kindly invited me to the christmas party of his startup at a bar he is the co-owner of. For some reason both my main camera (Nikon D200) and event photography lens were broke at the time. I think I was attending so many events and doing so much traveling, I was extremely hard on my equipment.
That day I dug up my old Nikon D70, and my landscape photography lens, try to put the biggest flash diffuser I could find, and started shooting anyway. I really tried to push the camera and lens for all it was worth. Slide is a really great venue, but pre-D3 ISO range and a small aperture lens can’t really do it justice. Oh well, just focus on the subjects lit by the flash and ignore the rest, because who can see anything else?
I kissed a girl Slide, Union Square, San Francisco, California
Marie and I don’t often get to Fisherman’s Wharf since I moved away from there, but since her sister was visiting, we decided to make the drive for breakfast. The nice thing about the Wharf is that the better food places aren’t busy because they aren’t frequented by tourists who are looking for anything labeled as “world famous.”
Because I was one of the first people to post pictures on Yelp, the owners recognize us and sometimes give us a fruit cup while we are waiting for our order. That’s another opportunity to photograph.
As I’ve mentioned before, one of the interesting things about shooting with a Leica camera is its limitations. A close rangefinder focusing of 70cm means puts more in than the food in frame showing a bit of the environment the food lives in… even if it only appears as bokeh.
Here is the same fruit cup shot on an iPhone using Camera+
As for processing, mostly I spent the time familiarizing myself with Lightroom’s built-ins. I still think in Aperture (and external plugins), but I’m trying to discover how much I can do things in my preferred style in Lightroom. I masked away some of the background saturation, brightness, and detail, though since I’m not yet familiar with shortcuts, my masking leaves a little to be desired. It’s odd because the more you process an image, the less you can tell it was photographed with a Leica. Lightroom’s film grain effect, while not as good as DxO or nik, is a great convenience when viewed close up or printed.
I forgot how many things I (still) own from the new apartment: the bicycles and bike rack, my mom’s paintings from Japan, the Sharp Aquos LCD TV set is in now in the bedroom, the component rack in my dad’s house, the Plexo light in storage, and the speakers are in a pile of stuff to go to Goodwill (the DVI cable and eating tray were already given away). The strange cabling was because I snaked an extra-long DVI cable down from my girlfriend’s PowerMac G5 upstairs so she could show wedding video montages to her clients.
This was my first time using my just-purchased Panasonic Lumix camera in a very low light situation. I may have pushed the optical image stabilization a bit too far, surprisingly, even though it is at the native ISO, the RAW file has a lot of noise by today’s standards. Yet back then, when I felt the delay of the exposure, I was shocked that I had a usable image at all. And 28mm and 16:9…oh, that sweet, sweet wide angle!
This is a photo of my grandfather. This may have been taken around 1939 somewhere over the Pacific when he came as a postdoctoral student to study at Princeton University.
As you can see by what he is holding, photography runs in the family. 😉
A student of my grandfather (and my mom) managed to get a hold of an old family album sometime after his death in 1992. Because Korea is making a postage stamp of him, he digitized, posted the images for the steering committee, whereupon my uncle sent them to me. It is kind of crazy what sort of memories flipping through these scans bring to me, I can’t imagine how it makes my uncle feel.
If you live in The Richmond, you know that B*Star Bar is like eating at Burma Superstar but without the line.
Pork Tocino with Garlic Fried Rice
B*Star Bar, The Richmond, San Francisco, California, United States
Sony DSC-RX1
0.013 sec (1/80) @ f/4.5, iso400, 35 mm
My favorite brunch dish there is the Pork Tocino. Grilled jerk pork over a bed of garlic fried rice and cherry tomatoes, topped with scallions and balsamic vinegar.
Since Marie loves their Huevos Racheros, I end up ordering this dish a lot. The only times I don’t is when we bring a guest, then I suggest they get it and I order something else.
