A couple of years ago, armed with a new 105mm lens, I went for a walk about town.  I was eager to try out the new lens and it was a beautiful day in the city.

The Nikon 105mm f/2.8 macro lens is by far one of the best lenses made by Nikon that I’ve owned.  It has great picture quality including tack sharp focus as well as really nicely rendered out-of-focus areas (known as bokeh).

While the primary intended use of the lens is for macro photography, I find it also makes a nice portrait lens – although the 105mm focal length (especially combined with the 1.4x crop factor on Nikon dx bodies) means you have to stand quite a distance from the subject in order to get that portrait shot.

As I was walking around town I came across the Love Parade (since re-branded a few times) – a celebration of techno music in the streets.  It’s actually a pretty cool scene – streets swarming with people just dancing to the music.

I spent a little while with the crowds enjoying the sun and the music.  This photo was from one of the many floats going by.  It was shot at f/2.8 to minimize the focal plane down to just the dancers, and to render the background out of focus.  With the bright sun and open aperture, I ended up with a shutter speed of 1/500th of a second which helped freeze the action.

I like the way that everyone is smiling and having a great time – and I like that each of the dancers is looking someplace different.  In addition, their arms going in different directions also adds a to the interesting composition while at the same time they’re each wearing the same outfits and wigs bringing some consistency across the scene.

I decided to crop the photo down to remove some of the float and to really draw the focus in to the dancers.

Street celebrations like these can make for great photo opportunities – especially ones with so much energy.  I have yet to bump into this one again but I’ve always got my eye out for street celebrations that I think would make for more compelling shots.

Last year, San Francisco (and much of the world) was getting ready for the summer Olympics in Beijing.  San Francisco had vied for the honor of hosting the games but was beat out by, well several cities actually.  We didn’t make it into the final rounds of consideration.

But, we still had the privilege of having the torch travel through our city.  The nature of what that honor represented however, was brought into question by supporters of the Tibetan freedom movement.  The Olympic torch, on its way to Beijing, was slated to go right through the Tibetan plateau.  This was, by some accounts, a smack right straight in the face to the Tibetans by the Chinese who, from the same viewpoint, have occupied and irreprably damaged Tibet and its culture.

And so, in Europe and elsewhere, the Olympic torch relay had had its share of troubles and it was shaping up that San Francisco would be the scene of a pretty large clash.  Here we have a very large Chinese population (especially when you add in all the folks who were bussed in from throughout the state by Chinese supporters) and you also have a very liberal population – one with a definite bias towards a free Tibet.

I spent a few hours with the crowds, photographing Chinese and Tibetan supporters as they marched, demonstrated, and participated in the freedoms we enjoy so much here in San Francisco.  It really was a brilliant day with only one thing missing – the Olympic torch.  It seems the City deemed it better to shuffle it off to another part of town without telling any of the masses who came to see it and express their views; or to any of the news media for that matter, who were gathered around looking rather lost.  It was incredibly disappointing.

This photo I like as a portrait of a protestor:  The masked face, the distant gaze, the hat pulled low over the face.  I also like the framing and composition of the shot.  IT was rather difficult moving among the crowds taking photos – and in this photo I used my 80-200mm zoom lens – a great lens, but one which really draws the subject near making shots like this difficult to achieve in such a crowded space.  I was shooting at aperture priority, looking for a narrow depth of field to keep only the one person in focus and I think I did a reasonably good job (the focus is just a shy too narrow, favoring the closer side of his face).

It’s hard to believe that this was already a year ago, this week.

In 2005 I was getting ready to leave one job for another (this theme is especially relevant to me these days..).  I had a short trip planned between jobs – to Vietnam – and I decided to treat myself to a digital SLR for the trip.

I purchased a Nikon D70 since I already had a Nikon setup with some lenses, etc., and since I couldn’t justify the more expensive D100 (and certainly couldn’t justify the more expensive Pro models).

With my new camera in hand I trekked over to Japantown with my sister and nieces to test out the system.  I was so excited about the immediate feedback from the LCD screen and I even appreciated the extended focal length for shots like these, where I was shooting over a crowd onto the stage.  In retrospect, I should have carried around my 70-200mm lens a lot more as this shot would have benefited from a little tighter cropping.  I try to carry that lens around a bit more these days, though it does weigh a ton.

I fired off several shots of the drummers and eventually settled on the slightly slower shutter speed which helps convey the motion in the blurred hands.

This and other shots were taken on April 23rd of 2005, three years ago this week.