About various photos I’ve taken. Unlike other entries, these are dated with the date I took the photo (or thereabouts).
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 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 March 29, 2012
Dario removing his earphones when he noticed me trying to take his photo.
South of Market, San Francisco, California
Leica M8, Cosina-Voigtländer NOKTON 50mm F1.1
1/60sec, iso 160, 50mm (67mm)
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.
Photo from July 27, 2013
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.
Photos from December 15, 2007
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?
Nikon D70, Nikkor 12-24mm f/4G
1/20 sec @ f/4, iso 1250, 12mm (18mm)