Yearly Archives: 2012

Best of 2012

A productive year.

I chose 72 favorites which you can download as a slide show. That’s two rolls of film …. Best viewed on an iPad with GoodReader or iBooks, but as it’s a plain PDF file, anything will work. Preview works well on a Mac, in full screen mode. The file is 10MB.

Touch or click the picture below. Equipment, exposure and date information appears below each snap. Enjoy!


Touch or click to see the slideshow.

I asked Lightroom to report on the images I added to its catalog in 2012 and it came back with this:

I was amazed to see how much I used the 16-35 current G Nikkor, which I have denigrated for its resin barrel here more than once. Plastic or not, it obviously works for me. In the above table ’75mm’ refers to the 75-150mm Nikon Series E zoom and ’80mm’ means the 80-200mm Nikkor zoom. These are MF lenses and even though I have ‘chipped’ them, it’s impossible to program a zoom range in the EXIF settings. The ’35-70mm’ optic is the discontinued AF-D trombone Nikkor zoom.

The above is what I kept, meaning after the cull.

Here’s the camera and lens data for the 72 images in the slide show:

The 13 count under 0.0mm results from old Nikkor MF lenses used before I installed the CPU chip which properly reports focal length. Without a CPU installed LR is ‘blind’ as to the lens used. The lenses used for these 13 snaps were 20mm – 4, 50mm f/2 – 3, 75-150mm – 1, 200mm – 2, 300mm – 1 and 500mm – 2. I appear to have been focal length agnostic in 2012, whereas I usually trend to the 28mm and shorter end of the spectrum. All those great MF Nikkors account for the 2012 data spread.

I cannot think of a better metric for determining whether you should keep a body or a lens than by consulting the ‘keeper’ data in Lightroom. If the hardware at issue is missing, sell it.

As for ISO, I’m pretty much a 400 ASA, er, ISO stick-in-the-mud. Years with Kodak’s TriX film is a hard habit to shake!

Finally, dates speak to my commitment to try and get out at least one day every week to take pictures:

People feature in 48 of the 72 images and all save a solitary landscape with birds were taken on the street, mostly in San Francisco.

The point here is that you can learn an awful lot about your work habits, with a view to change and improvement, by studying LR’s metadata summaries. These data not only objectively inform you of your work habits but can point to new directions – ‘must use wider lenses more’, ‘should try larger apertures more frequently’, and so on. The last screenshot, above, is an important one to me, as it tells whether I have been snapping regularly. Doing so, I find, keeps the eye and brain sharp. Long layoffs work for some, but not for me.

For me, the most troubling metric is that fully 79% of my ‘keepers’ in 2012 were in the modest aperture range of f/4 to f/8. There’s little point in owning fast lenses if that’s all you use, it seems to me and full frame sensors are all about selective focus. So one commitment for 2013 is to open those lenses up. Next year’s results need to show far more f2 and f/2.8. And yes, f/1.4!

One other finding. Only one in seven of my snaps was round-tripped to Photoshop from Lightroom (my import repository), mostly for correction of leaning verticals. This speaks to my commitment to get it right when pressing the button, with only light post processing. That seems right to me.

The work ethic

Keep trying.

One of the key reasons which saw me immigrate to the United States over three decades ago was Americans’ work ethic. I had worked with them in London and was amazed at how much harder working and more driven they were than their English counterparts.

I share that work ethic to this day and when it comes to taking pictures I’m a strong believer that ‘a little and often’ is far more likely to result in consistently good results than occasional bursts of activity interspersed with long layoffs.

The artist and photographer Chuck Close, even though confined to a wheelchair for many years now, puts it well:

“Inspiration is for amateurs — the rest of us just show up and get to work. And the belief that things will grow out of the activity itself and that you will — through work — bump into other possibilities and kick open other doors that you would never have dreamt of if you were just sitting around looking for a great ‘art idea.’ And the belief that process, in a sense, is liberating and that you don’t have to reinvent the wheel every day. Today, you know what you’ll do, you could be doing what you were doing yesterday, and tomorrow you are gonna do what you did today, and at least for a certain period of time you can just work. If you hang in there, you will get somewhere.”


The work ethic at work. This is me, happy as a clam.

I have published hundreds of my snaps here over the past year and when I look back it is with mixed feelings. Dismay that I could not do better and renewed hope that I will. I hope you have enjoyed accompanying me on the journey.

Columns of the year 2012 – Part 3 of 3

Looking back.

Continuing from parts I and II.

Photographs:

September 29 – The annual dog parade always yields a cornucopia of material and in addition to publishing several snaps I disclosed here, for the first time to a global audience, my vote in the 2012 US Presidential Election.

October 13 – The Marin headlands provide their own rugged beauty as well as affording some of the most splendid views of San Francisco.

October 30 – Equipment maketh the man, and it appears that it’s just about impossible to make bad pictures with the 180mm AF-D Nikkor lens. Mine’s a bit of a beater but the optics are outstanding in every way at any aperture.

October 31 – This year’s Christmas calendar featured pictures taken over many years of the Transamerica building.

November 9 – SF’s Mission District yields riches on a stroll with the 24mm Nikkor.

November 23 – Sometimes you get lucky. An innocuous shot of a short order cook took on a deeper mysterious theme when processed.

December 22 – I reminisced about my Crown Graphic view camera and published a snap or two taken with that monster.

December 25 – Beautiful kids beautifully dressed offer subject matter for the 180mm Nikkor.

Photographers:

September 5 – Cindy Sherman‘s work was exhibited at SF’s MoMA and the show was splendid, showing this talented woman’s output over several decades.

October 15 – The Radical Camera show at SF’s Contemporary Jewish Museum did a fine job of displaying the work of the New York Photo League.

November 30 – Not all great wealth has to emulate the crass boorishness of a Trump, as this gorgeous advertisement from a premier watch maker proves.

December 5 – O. Winston Link’s railway images continue to delight and satisfy.

Photography:

September 26 – The iPhone 5 arrived and proved that changes at the margin are all that’s in store from the former innovators at Apple. A slightly better camera in a decidedly underwhelming device.

September 30 – The month closed with some gorgeous photography in Ralph Lauren’s clothing catalog.

October 9 – The Nikon D2x, at very low cost, joined the D700 chez Pindelski.

November 12 – proving that there’s one born every minute, Leica continues to make silly priced gear for silly people. Get this. $10,000 and it can’t even do color. “But dahling, the greys, the tones ….”.

November 29 – Finally, someone has made a full frame point-and-shoot. Unfortunately, Sony forgot to include a proper viewfinder.

December 26 – DxO Viewpoint offers a better mousetrap for fixing keystoning at a bearable price.

Columns of the year 2012 – Part 2 of 3

Looking back.

Continuing from part I.

Photographs:

May 1 – I’m no fan of monochrome, largely regarding it as a cop out for poor vision, but I get into the reminiscence thing in Once upon a time ….

May 13 – Everyone has a magic moment now and then and mine took place with A snap over lunch at a Mission District brew pub.

May 22 – I don’t much reminisce about my film days, but trust me, you will love Paris, 1974 because it’s all about the most beautiful city in the world.

May 28 – An earnest walk along Mission Street saw me doing a number on Papa Hemingway.

May 31 – A visit to Hayes Valley saw one of those serendipitous discoveries of a little known and utterly charming area of the City by the Bay.

June 2 – Filoli is a wonder, not least for the fact that I like to drive there on a summer’s day and imagine that, yes, I really am Blake Carrington of Dynasty fame. I even figured out what it would take to buy and privatize the place.

June 10 – Bernal Heights on the west side of San Francisco was an incredible discovery, and I started writing about it here, with a piece on the four legged world following. Given my love of dogs this was probably the most fun I had taking pictures in 2012.

Photographers:

May 17 – Paul Bock shared some of his lovely work with me and my readers.

July 5 – English photographer Martin Parr did a number on the people, ‘culture’ and food of the deep south and it’s hard to blame him, as I spent a miserable year of my life in North Carolina surrounded by people who had married their cousins. There’s every reason to believe things get even worse the further south you go.

August 20 – The 120th anniversary of Vogue brought with it some splendid photography.

August 28 – The man who took the most famous photograph in human history passed away.

Photography:

June 23 – Ever focused on being better/faster/cooler than the MacPro, my computer builder FU Steve made sure that The HP100 goes ballistic was, indeed, a reality for my Hackintosh.

June 14 – Walter Mandler was a god, and I really got into it here.

June 24 – I love musicals and what better place than to start than at the top with Lenny?

July 10 – after the usual installation hassles, I was able to confirm that Photoshop CS5 (and Lightroom 4) run at more than adequate speed on the 2012 MacBook Air, making for an excellent portable rig. The 2012 MBA delivers a great increase in speed over my previous 2010 model.

July 20 – a focus on essential hardware in the event of an all consuming fire saw me choosing the 50mm f/1.4 Nikkor-S as the lens to take with me.

July 29 – my infinitely upgradable Hackintosh saw the installation of Mountain Lion. Apple’s OS upgrades have never been cheaper – ML cost $20 – or less worthwhile, each conferring additional unnecessary frou frou, Mercifully, the OS remains robust and stable.

August 5 – America excelled again, placing a camera on Mars. It’s fashionable to write America off and tell everyone in earshot that the future is in China or some other hole passing for existence in the Far East. Utter rot. Last I checked MIT, CalTech, Stanford, Harvard, Yale, Brown, Columbia, Cornell, Dartmouth, UC Berkeley, Princeton and Penn were all in America. All are richly endowed, and the whole world continues to try to gain entry to these, the finest schools on earth.

August 13 – The exercise in serial boredom and commercial excess which is the Olympic Games was relieved by a splendidly humorous piece that only the British can do. It saw HM The Queen parachuting into the Olympic Stadium, after slipping the watchful eye of her bodyguard, none other than 007.