Photo from October 9, 2005
Sorry for the delay in posting photos. I got sidetracked trying to understand how Lightroom organizes the world.
Nikon D70, Lensbaby 2.0, Tokina macro adapter
1/1000 sec, iso 200, 50mm (75mm)
Photo from December 20, 2014
Sometimes there not much to a photo, because it’s just a snapshot:
Xmas at SFO
San Francisco International Airport, San Mateo County, California
iPhone 6
1/17 sec @ f/2.2, iso 250, 4.15mm (35mm)/caption]
When dropping my friend off at SFO, I noticed the Christmas lighting and Golden Gate Bridge decorations at the airport and snapped this.
It’s impressive how good the cameras in mobile phones are nowadays. The only issue is JPEG processing means that Lightroom noise reduction + sharpening posterizes the image somewhat (look at the embankment to the right).
I wonder what SFO looks like now that the Super Bowl is in town.
Photo from January 28, 2003
There were so many great photos taken this weekend even though it was a 2.5 megapixel camera purchased in the previous century! Little did I know these would be among the last exposures ever taken with this camera.
I’ll definitely have to stitch and post some more photos fro this trip.
It was the morning of the second day of a hike along the Pt. Reyes National Seashore. From our campsite we took a short hike down to the Sculptured Beach and walked along to the south end where we sighted the arch doorway to the Secret Beach.
It was not yet negative low tide so we were going to have to prep a bit to get down to the beach before sprinting through the doorway. That was a lot of fun. Getting almost stranded (again!)… not so much.
On the next day, a wave would smash me against the rocks and destroy the camera that took this photo.
Because I knew it’s nearly impossible then to stitch a panorama with moving waves, this was actually intended to be two separate panoramic stitches. Unfortunately, my overlap wasn’t as good as when I started using dSLRs and there’s no optical distortion formula for such an old camera so PTGui couldn’t fix the horizon correctly. It’s especially bad around my friend Sean (I kept the exposure of him looking at the arch doorway).
I tried fixing the mask as much as I could in Photoshop and then added a crop, color saturation, sharpness, and noise reduction in Lightroom CC, in addition to some last minute cloning out of some ghosts. The noise reduction is pretty strong and smooths out some of the rock detail that’s actually there in the photo because Olympus CCD cameras of the era were notoriously bad with blue channel noise.
Here’s a crazy thought. The stitch ends up being 8.7 megapixel. Today I could get the whole scene in a single wide angle photo on my camera and still have better resolution. I should revisit these beaches, even though some are now inaccessible.
Photo from August 27, 2007
In the fall of 2007, my friend Megan McCarthy wrote an amusing article on valleywag on the wardrobe of Silcon Valley: a blue oxford button down dress shirt and khaki pants. It’s basically a safe bet at tech meet ups that you’ll see more white guys in blue button downs than anything else.
Later that month, I hadn’t ironed my clothing in a while so all that was usable in my closet were those aforementioned blue button downs. So this particular day, as I was wearing “the uniform,” I took a self-portrait to show I’m as original as all the west. Granted, it’s a little bit different, but that’s because San Francisco is a bit colder than valley 40 miles to the south.
Panasonic DMC-LX1
1/4 sec at f/4.9, iso 200, 23.2mm (103mm)
I actually took and processed this image a long time ago for a blog post I never did.
Continue reading about how this photo was taken and processed after the jump
Photo from December 30, 2005
I love taking photos of people taking photos.
Nikon D70, Lensbaby 2.0
1/80 sec at f/2.0, iso 200, 50mm (75mm)
Continue reading about how this photo was taken and processed after the jump
Photo from October 7, 2011
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.
Nikon D3, Nikkor 24-70mm f/2.8G, Hoya Pro1 Digital MC Close-up +3
1/50sec @ ƒ2.8, iso 800, 29mm
Continue reading about how this photo was processed after the jump
Photo from August 10, 2013
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.
iPhone 5 + Pro HDR
1/140 sec @ f/2.4, iso 50, 4.13mm (33mm)
Photo from November 11, 2006
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.
Panasonic DMC-LX1
1/20 sec at f/2.8, iso 200, 6.3mm (28mm)
Photo from December 7, 2005
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.
Nikon D70, Nikkor 70-200mm f/2.8G VR
3 exposures @ f/13, iso 800, 70mm (105mm)
While I did make a christmas card, I never processed the other photos until this project came up on my Aperture to Lightroom migration list.