Yearly Archives: 2011

Cityscapes 2011

San Francisco.

By turn strange, surreal, eccentric, colorful, monochromatic and never predictable. San Francisco is all of these, and this is how I saw it over the past twelve months. Unlike my Street Snaps where people are the object of interest, in my Cityscapes people, if they are even present, are part of the broader cityscape.

Click the picture for the slide show.

Mostly snapped on the Panasonic G1 with the kit lens, with the last few on the G3. The little Pannys don’t look like much and I can only express my deep gratitude to the maker for that. Electrician’s tape, used to obscure brand names on the hardware, is a useful adjunct. While one was taken with the 45-200mm Panny zoom, the 14-45mm kit lens really is perfect for this sort of thing and it’s all I carry most of the time. Were it non-interchangeable I would not mind one bit. The G3 adds two stops of grain reduction compared to the G1, so in a pinch I’ll enlarge what I need a bit more without compromising quality too much, and avoid having to carry an extra lens, small as it may be.

CameraTrace

Catch that thief.

This is clever. Given that most cameras record their serial number in the photo file’s metadata, this app allows you to track pictures published on sites like Flickr using that serial number, searching for it on the web:

Click the picture for the maker’s site.

Now my Panny G3 is not exactly something I would really miss were it stolen. It’s not ‘throw-away cheap’ but it’s close and, if stolen, likely does not warrant the expenditure of time and effort to recover it, though I suppose the psychic satisfaction of catching a thief might be worthwhile. But if I owned something silly-priced like a Leica M9 or S2, or a digital Hasselblad, then this app would get my attention. As for the iPhone, whose content has value far above the cost of the hardware, ‘Find My iPhone’ does the trick at no extra cost and stories abound of the flat footed set apprehending thieves.

For UK residents, there’s a like app named StolenCameraFinder.

Something to bookmark should that awful day ever come.

Goosed

A charming display.

Spotted in downtown Carmel, CA.

G3, Olympus 9-18mm @ 18mm, 1/320, f/5.6, ISO1600.

In the land of high-end retail everything sells.

You can see just how diminutive the G3 is in the reflection. Any smaller and it would be hard to hold.

Rather than risking reflections from the camera’s flash, I processed the snap in Photoshop, outlining the birds with the Magic Lasso and bringing them up a tad using the Curves tool.

Steamed up

Flowers.

I don’t do flowers, not if I can help it. It’s a genre where it’s almost impossible to say anything new.

Yet one of the key attractions of the coastal town of Carmel, CA is the abundance of flowers on display throughout the year. Be it in stores, restaurants or well tended gardens, they are everywhere.

These caught my eye on a stroll through downtown the other day:


Carmel, CA. G3, Olympus 9-18mm @ 12mm, 1/200, f/5.6, ISO320.

The wide zoom Olympus MFT 9-18mm lens is ideal for this sort of thing, and makes a fine walk-about companion for the 14-45mm kit zoom.