This is a photo from last year. My parents were visiting town and we took the opportunity to check out the newly redesigned Academy of Sciences in San Francisco.  The building is really great to look at from the outside, including it’s living roof.  It’s not your typical science academy with its columns and marble..

Underneath that living roof is a large 4-story rainforest that reminded Meghan and I of our trip to Belize.  It’s a great exhibit with a huge variety of animals roaming about; from frogs to birds to butterflies.

I had my Canon G10 with me, not the larger Nikon set up but that little camera does a pretty good job considering how easy it is to carry it around compared to the larger DSLR with flash, macro lens, etc.,

For these indoor shots I had the lens wide open, both in an attempt to narrow the focus but to also bring in as much light so that I could freeze the action with a faster shutter.  I also bumped the ISO up to 400 which introduced a little grain in the image (this is one area where the Nikon beats the compact Canon hands down).  This all resulted in a shutter speed of 1/250 which was enough to handhold the shot and capture the subjects.

I like the bright colors of the butterfly but the focus does appear to be just a little off, just forward of the butterfly’s position.  I chalk this up to being in a hot, crowded space working with small objects darting around.  That and having to rely on the Canon’s autofocus unchecked, as it was not the conditions to muck around with small focus adjustments.

After this trip I decided I want to go back with my bigger setup but as of now it’s still on the future list.

Fitting, I suppose given the weather that we’ve been having in the Bay Area this week.

2 years ago I left the apartment earlier than usual for work and spent an hour or so downtown tracking people during their commute, looking for photographic opportunities.  Despite getting a little wet, I had a great time and continued my adventure that evening after work.  I ended up with a few shots that I liked making this week’s selection a little difficult.  I opted for this black & white shot as I like the way the woman seems to be tracking the white line that crosses the frame.

I had set out to try to capture the mood of commuting in the city in the rain – I wanted lots of umbrellas, and blurred motion to signify the movement of the people looking to avoid getting wet.  I had planned on converting some of the images to black and white but I ended up with some great colors in some of the shots and left those as shot.  But shots like this I felt were indeed better when converted to black and white as I had originally intended.

To achieve this shot, I metered the scene and stopped down the aperture to f/22 in order to maximize the shutter speed.  In order to keep the shutter speed from being too slow and in order to introduce some grain to the image, I bumped up the ISO settings to 3200.  I had the camera set this way for several shots and would pick a target and start shooting.  In this case, I chose the woman with the plastic umbrella and I tracked her across the street as I shot – thus slightly blurring the rest of the scene.  In Lightroom I converted the image to black and white.  I altered a few settings to bump up the contrast and increase the graininess of the shot.

I have it on my list of projects to go out and shoot some more like this, but I find it hard to motivate to go out in the mornings in this rain if I’m not heading to work..  Ah well, there will be more rain storms.  That I know.

This is another in a series of walking around shots, this time, taken in San Francisco.

Back in 2007 I was walking to work quite a bit and I’d usually follow a pretty similar path.  This was also in the heyday of sidewalk stenciling, where people were taking their message to the streets quite literally, spray painting stenciled illustrations and sayings on the sidewalks and crosswalks around town.

Along this one section of my walk was stenciled this message:

We are not awake to the changes happening within.

I quite liked the message, it was something to ponder while on my walk.  But what struck me was the way in which it was delivered..  The stenciler broke up the message across a long stretch of the block into ever-increasing length, starting with a simple

We

We are

We are not

We are not awake

etc., etc., until the full message was displayed.  It was a great way to get ones attention.

This image isn’t spectacular in itself, more a documentation of the message and the medium.  To that end, I wanted a close cropping on the words but I wanted to provide some contextual visuals as well so I left in a few of the sidewalk cracks.  I decided to offset the positioning just a little and only provide some of the sidewalk cracks, so that I didn’t end up with a completely balanced composition – I like the slight uneasiness of the framing.  Other than that I just set the camera and shot.  I used my older Canon SD point and shoot camera for this shot as it was the camera I had with me.  As I’ve indicated before, I’ll always carry a camera of some sort with me – these days at the very least a cell phone camera but usually a full camera (if only a point and shoot) for better control over the images.

In 2004 a group of us went for a camping trip on Angel Island in the San Francisco Bay.

For that trip I had along with me my point and shoot digital camera (at the time an Olympus D40) and my film camera (this pre-dated my digital SLR days).  Once I had a relatively reasonably reliable digital point and shoot it was pretty standard for me to shoot b&w film and use the point and shoot for color snapshots.

I later scanned this image in using my Nikon Coolpix film scanner.  And looking at this image, vs. digital images converted to black and white, there is definitely a difference.  I love the grain in the image.

After scanning the image in, I did some post-processing in Lightroom, including lightening up the faced of the girls a little and improving the contrast a little on this foggy day.  I like this picture as a simple portrait of my nieces.  They’re smiling and having a good time.

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.

Back in 2003 San Francisco held its annual “Grand Prix” bike race – this was before it morphed into the Tour of California.

The previous year I was a little surprised by the race – it was happening not too far away from my neighborhood – and I made a note to try to watch some of the race next time.

So I made my way to the course – which was right around the area of town that I was about to move to.  I didn’t really think to grab my camera though, so all I had was my little point and shoot digitial camera – this would have been my Olympus camera from the early days of digital – the frustrating shutter lag and relatively poor image quality days.

Even still, I think I managed to grab some of the excitement of the event.  (I also considered this photo for the weekly choice, but ultimately preferred the chosen shot.)

Throughout the race I chose a couple of vantage points – along the hill climb on Russian Hill and just past one of the 90 degree turns from Broadway onto Polk street.  This made for a great place to take shots but was also an awesome place to watch the action.  The riders would come whipping around the corner at pretty good speeds right at you and it was more than once that I considered it a possibility that one would crash into the crowds.  Worse still were the chase vehicles, their tires chirping as they skipped through the turn.

I shot this image on ‘program’ mode, with this camera there was no point in trying to control the camera in any kind of manual setting.  The shutter speed was 1/400th of a second, which was enough to grab a sharp image of the rider in the center of the frame while the closer rider has just enough motion blur to convey the sense of action in the scene.

There’s a bit of lens flare in the shot, a result of the angle of the sun in relation to where I’m standing (and the fact that there was nothing shielding this small lens from the harsh light).  But I don’t find it to be too distracting.

It’s too bad that the Grand Prix hasn’t continued, as I really enjoyed it.  But I did see this year an advertisement for the Giro di San Francisco – which is the continuation of some of the smaller races around Levi Plaza that used to be a part of the larger Grand Prix.  Unfortunately I saw the ad after the event had already taken place.. so I’ll have to keep an eye out for it next year.