I kissed a girl

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?

**I kissed a girl**
Slide, Union Square, San Francisco, California

Nikon D70, Nikkor 12-24mm f/4G
1/20 sec @ f/4, iso 1250, 12mm (18mm)

Continue reading about this photo after the jump

Posted on January 16, 2016January 16, 2016 by tychay 0

Fresh Fruit Cup

Photos from October 17, 2010.

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.

Posted on January 13, 2016January 13, 2016 by tychay 0

Pounce in shadow

Photo from May 3, 2006.

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!

I miss my cat.

Posted on January 12, 2016January 13, 2016 by tychay 0

Cameras run in the family

**Taikyue Ree somewhere over the Pacific (~1939)**

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.

Posted on January 11, 2016January 11, 2016 by tychay 0

Pork Tocino

If you live in The Richmond, you know that B*Star Bar is like eating at Burma Superstar but without the line.

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.

Continue reading about some WordPress plugin notes after the jump

Posted on May 14, 2015May 14, 2015 by tychay 0

Bees

Photo from July 18th, 2009.

Close up of two wasps around a bone or piece of stick — **Not Bees**
China Camp State Park, Marin, California

Nikon D3, Lensbaby Composer, Tokina .45x macro
1/160 sec @ f/6.3, iso640, 50mm

This was the day of the 2nd Annual Worldwide Photowalk. On the way back to the car, I noticed these yellowjackets congregating around something. This became an excuse to pull out a closeup adapter and attempt some macro photography. I had to get pretty close though which caused my girlfriend some consternation.

The photo and processing was done a long time ago so I can’t comment on it very much. It looks like I had a predilection for overly saturated colors back then. 😉

Posted on March 17, 2015May 6, 2015 by tychay 2

Central Park

Photo from October 11, 2011

I found this unfinished photo stitch while randomly going through my Aperture library.

Central Park
Central Park, New York City, New York

Nikon D3, Nikkor 24-70 f/2.8G
10 exposures (1/320 – 1/125sec) @ f/5 iso 200, 24mm

Continue reading about this photo after the jump

Posted on March 14, 2015March 14, 2015 by tychay 0

Terry’s Backstreet Photography

Photos from January 24, 2015.

A weekend away from it all was also an opportunity to try to shoot again with my Leica. I haven’t been doing any photography for a long time, especially with this camera — just having it with me was a minor success, even if I left it in the bag almost the entire time.

Finally, while we were eating a quiet lunch in St. Helena, I got the courage to take the M8 out and to start shooting. It’s frustrating to realize that you have to relearn how to focus and expose manually — even more embarrassing is forgetting to take off the lens cap before pressing the shutter button! But then you remember that photography is about learning how to see, and there is a small joy in experiencing that again as a beginner.

Marie, waiting for food
Cindy’s Backstreet Kitchen, St. Helena, Napa Valley, California

Leica M8, Cosina-Voigtländer NOKTON 35mm F1.2 Aspherical
1/125sec, iso 160, 35mm (47mm)

Continue reading about some photos I took with my Leica M8 and iPhone 6 after the jump

Posted on March 9, 2015January 13, 2016 by tychay 1

Holiday on the beach

Photos from February 15, 2015.

I turn the ever-boring “Stretch-X” workouts in P90X on the rest days into excuses to go running. On some days, the time and place fall in line with a holiday, in this case President’s Day weekend on a beautiful late-afternoon in San Francisco.

Holiday on the Beach
China Beach, San Francisco, California

iPhone 6
@ ƒ2.2, ISO32, 4.15mm (29mm)

How lucky I am to live in such a place that I see this on my weekly run!
Continue reading about this photo after the jump

Posted on March 7, 2015March 9, 2015 by tychay 0

The Washington Monument (and me)

From my Uncle Francis:

Hello Terry,

Your birthday is coming soon (6/9/12). Happy birthday to you, Terry.

We hope for your & Marie’s continued success & happyness.

I am sorry for not communicating with you. I am still OK but have to do many medical checkup and others.

I have been looking at old photos in an album was sent by my + your mom’s mom after we lost our home by fire in 1991.
I found a photo of you, Ken, & your mom at the Washington Monument, all in smile. What a happy time that was! I often
wish that your mom is still here. She would have be mighty happy and proud of you and Kenny becoming so successful.

Uncle Francis & Auntie Clara

PS: I am a novice at Photoshop to retouch, hence, sorry for the photo being a kind of old faint yellowish look. A higher resolution (but without retouch) picture is attached.

Terry, Mom, and Ken at Washington D.C. (1973)

Me, Mom, and Ken at Washington D.C. (1973)
National Mall, Washington D.C.

Pentax K

(Of course, I retouched it in Aperture.)

Here are two stories inspired by the photo, I’ll share with you on my birthday.Continue reading Washington Monument stories after the jump

Posted on June 9, 2012June 13, 2016 by tychay 0

The Woodwork

You tell that other boy, not to touch the woodwork