Monthly Archives: January 2011

Eddie Rickenbacker’s

Dining, Photographs

For real men.

Real men ride motorbikes, hang out at local bars and think nothing of confrontation and a good fist fight. If that’s your sort of thing, and you believe real motorcycles come from America and Europe, then you owe it to yourself to visit Eddie Rickenbacker’s at Second Street and Minna Street, in the vibrant South of Market district in San Francisco.

The food is cheap and served in the usual gargantuan American helpings, drinks are inexpensive and the atmosphere is real. A BLT served with fries plus draught beer (get the Racer IPA) will set you back $17 with tip. This is a genuine old place with a long bar on one side, an unkempt set of tables on the other and with friendly help. No fake Tiffany lampshades and Armani wearers here. And did I mention that Norm, the proprietor, who could stand to lose 100 lbs or so, hangs out on a sofa at the end of the bar …. his breathing assisted by an oxygen bottle? Like I said, this is not for the chi chi set. The snaps below will give you a sense of the place.

Located at Second and Minna, SoMA. A post war Triumph is above the entrance.

Classic Indian in the window on Second Street.

A 1922 Motosacoche and a 1952 Moto Guzzi.

A gorgeous 1920s Excelsior leads the parade of bikes suspended from the ceiling.

1955 Mustang Thoroughbred.

1930 Indian. They don’t make ’em like that any more and if you have
ever tried to kick start one that’s probably a good thing!

Indian Chief with complex leading link girder front forks.

1913 Henderson 4.

The obese proprietor, Norm, hangs out on the couch,
below the Moto Guzzi and a classic Indian, breathing with an oxygen bottle.
The waitress is compiling a food order with his help.

All snaps on the Panasonic G1 with the kit lens at ISO800. Real Men don’t use flash.

Sad update: Norm Hobday passed away February 25, 2011. He is now in the afterworld, enjoying the world of the two wheeled afterlife. All speed, Norm.

Voigtlander 25mm f/0.95 MFT lens

Hardware

Now that is fast!

Voigtlander (Cosina) has been making lenses for Leicas and a few other mounts for many years. Many of these appear to be derivatives of older Leitz designs and many have garnered positive reviews. For the most part they have been making lenses for full frame 35mm cameras so it was quite a surprise to see them come out with an MFT lens for the Panasonic and Olympus MFT bodies.

The Voigtlander 25mm f/0.95 MFT lens.

You can see more at Stephen Gandy’s Cameraquest site. Retailing at $900 in the US, the lens is sold out with new supplies expected in a month or so. There are some excellent pictures taken by Andrew Fildes using the Voigtlander on an Olympus E-P2 body here and in addition to being a fine photographer, Andrew has taken almost all the snaps at f/0.95 so you can get a sense of the depth of focus at full aperture. To put the aperture in perspective, the depth of field of a 25mm f/0.95 lens is identical to that of a 50mm f/1.9 on a full frame body, so it’s like using an f/2 lens wide open.

A couple of warnings. The lens is huge compared to regular MFT optics, it’s heavy as it’s all metal. It has zero automation. As regards aperture that’s hardly an issue. If you buy an f/0.95 lens you aren’t going to be using it at f/8. On the other hand, the lack of focus automation strikes me as a big negative in street work owing to the time delay from manual focusing, and you will have to focus fairly carefully on nearer subjects to make sure things are sharp.

By contrast, the fortcoming Fuji X100 with it’s 23mm f/2 lens will have a depth of field equivalent to an f/4.5 50mm lens on a full frame body, so the Voigtlander has two stops less depth of field than the Fuji at maximum aperture. That’s significant and noticeable. Andrew Fildes’s pictures show the DOF well and it’s rare that you get a real photographer showing off gear so well. DPReview may be the best technical review site for hardware but it’s the very last place on earth you are going to go to for quality photography.

I have bought gear from Gandy in the past and he is honest and easy to deal with. He has been in business for ages.

New Panasonic fast standard lens:

Panasonic is rumored to be announcing a 25mm f/1.4 lens (50mm FFE) with full automation in February, and that sounds like a far more practical alternative to trying to manually focus the Voigltlander behemoth. The Panny will have the same depth of field as a 50mm f/2.8 on a full frame camera and sounds like just the ticket if the Fuji X100 disappoints. I rather miss out-of-focus backgrounds with the G1 owing to the smallish maximum aperture of the kit zoom. I would guess the price will be $700. There’s already a 25mm f/1.4 Leica Summilux for regular 4/3rds cameras at $900 but it’s bulky and not in keeping with the compact MFT design concept. The 20mm f/1.7 Panny is another option worth considering for the street snapper, at a fraction of cost of the X100.

HC-B at SF MOMA

Photographers

Not great.

I finally made it to the Cartier-Bresson show at SF MOMA and have to say it was underwhelming.

There are four ‘periods’ in HC-B’s work:

  • The surrealist masterpieces 1931 -1951
  • The photojournalism – tourist snaps of China and Russia before they opened up
  • The portraits of famous people
  • America

The first is a beacon for modern photographers and was poorly shown, replete with low contrast small prints poorly lit, many yellowed. The curse of the ‘original print’ which I described here. Sure, his technique wasn’t the greatest, his exposure all over the place, but the work is definitive. It needs better display than MOMA managed. It’s this period that haunts, amazes and inspires.

The second is blah. Notable only for the fact that no Westerner had photographed these exotic places before.

The third has generally left me cold but I’m warming to it after this show. Too bad they didn’t include those two great shots of Giacometti crossing the street in the rain and moving one of his sculptures in the studio.

The fourth? Well, he sees only the crassness and vulgarity in America, something the show’s narrative repeats. He just does not ‘get’ America but, then again, he was French – an honorable excuse!

It’s on for another week, then moves to Atlanta. The MOMA show has too many mediocre works and displays over 200 pieces. 80 would have done it.

As you can see it was zooed, making the small prints even harder to enjoy.

Buildings

Photography

Little gear needed.

The days where you had to lug a field or view camera with a tilt front and adjustable back to correct for perspective distortion in architectural photography are largely gone. Now any competent digital camera with a dose of Photoshop thrown in can see to it that verticals cease converging and squares are square. There are also limited perspective correction tools in Lightroom 3 but the Transform tools in Photoshop are far more powerful. Once the image is exported from LR to PS, hit Cmnd-A in Photoshop to select the image and then the Transform tools in the Edit menu will come alive. To show the grid, which greatly aids alignment, hit Cmnd-‘ (apostrophe). The grid spacing can be set in Preferences.

Except for the last, every image accompanying this article was corrected using PS CS2->Edit->Transform->Distort. The Transform function in PS dates back to at least Photoshop 5 many years ago, so it’s not like you need the most recent version there is, and old versions like CS2 and before will run fine on modern Macs, automatically using Rosetta. As the perspective correction process will introduce some cropping of the original I purposefully include a good deal more in the snap than is otherwise required whenever I anticipate that perspective correction will be applied.

The Transform menu in Photoshop. This is CS2 but all later versions have it too.

When snapping architecture, an art form I greatly enjoy, I generally carry my Panasonic G1 with the 14-45mm kit lens and pocket that little wonder the 45-200mm zoom telephoto. This remains the only 400mm telephoto (full frame equivalent) which I think nothing of taking with me. Incredibly small, very sharp and with OIS built in to cut the shakes, it’s a miracle of modern optical and electronic technology. I may not use it that much but when I do, boy do I appreciate what it can do.

Mooching around San Francisco the other day I found more subjects with this little lens pair than seems decent. Splendid contrasty sun didn’t hurt, either.

Chevron Building, Stevenson and 2nd Street. 109mm.

The neo-modern flying saucer whimsy of the Chevron Building (1975) contrasts with the Beaux-Arts beauty in the foreground.

Bus stop on Fremont Street. 41mm.

Another touch of humor in what would just me another utilitarian municipal fixture otherwise.

Ooops! What was the architect thinking of here? 147mm.

Silly things like this can be picked out easily with a long telephoto lens. I added the vignetting in Lightroom – the 45-200mm does not vignette the corners, covering the frame superbly.

Old and new. 31mm.

The builders may have done a heavy handed job on the brickwork when they installed the new windows, but at least the old building survived. The monstrosity behind it just makes the oldie look better.

Reflections. 18mm.

Reflections are always fun. A healthy dose of Photoshop to fix the leaning verticals was called for here when round-tripping the original from Lightroom.

Oakland Bay Bridge seen through a street car on Steuart Street. 34mm.

One masterpiece of depression era engineering seen through another.

Don’t lease me. 23mm.

How badly do they want to lease this place after painting a broken window on it? Very droll. On Annie Street, north of east Mission Street.

With decent modern sensors, a fast ISO (I use ISO320 on the Panny G1 which is a good compromise between grain and speed on the smallish MFT sensor) and OIS, no tripod is needed, even with long lenses. At the long end of the 45-200mm I will always try to find that extra bit of support, be it a lamppost or parking meter, but it’s quite amazing what you can get away with and still come home with a sharp image.

The Quick and the Dead

Photographs

Sometimes you just have to run ….

I was traipsing around the most glorious city on the left coast yesterday enjoying weather designed by Hollywood and I got to thinking. (Pardon the awful English, I’ve been watching too many Clint Eastwood movies recently). Some days it’s perfectly clear you simply cannot take a good street photograph. Yes, you still have to go out, serve your time, bang away, fail miserably, knowing it’s the penance required for days like yesterday. I have lots of days of penance. So the city owed me one. And boy, did it ever deliver.

Don’t ask me how days like this happen. All I know is that when they do you grab the opportunity with both hands, ask no questions and push the button. You cannot predict it, you cannot analyze it and it’s beyond human comprehension. It’s just how it is.

So here, without further ado, are some of yesterday’s snaps with a few words thrown in about how it all happened.

Head man.

Piece of cake this one. I saw the guy at 100 yards and just waited. I had my patented Invisibility Cloak on so he could not see me. Impossible to miss something like this and what was he going to do? Drop his load?

Silent critic.

The only thing to do here was not to laugh. I tried half a dozen variants as the cell phone guy paced this way and that, oblivious to the world. All it took was for his critic to be placed just so. Funny thing about people on their cell phones. They become blind.

Big one.

I spotted this across Mission Street. As I crossed, trying not to be taken out by crazy cyclists convinced of their primacy on the road, I squeezed off a couple from a distance just in case. As I got closer and closer the subject remained stationary – maybe nor surprisingly – until I got the framing just so for the last in the series, the brick wall providing a nice counterbalance to her heft. It’s known as ‘sneaker zoom’. You keep walking until the subject fills the view. And where exactly do you get Levis in that size?

Pecker.

Pure serendipity, this one. I liked the composition and approached, hoping something might happen. Suddenly the bird landed and the guy on the right dipped his head. Click. No second chance here.

Kick ass.

This was nothing more than a knee jerk (!) reaction. The lady had raised her leg to support her purse, searching for quarters, and the man was trying to figure out the arcana of modern San Francisco parking meters. Just raise the camera and bang. No chance for composition. No time. I lucked out. It was that kind of day.

Hat, gloves and socks.

This very dignified gent was reliving the Old World, enjoying yesterday’s technology, aka a book, and all I tried to do was preserve his dignity and calm in the gorgeous light. Not hard when your subject is engrossed. He’s got that white thing down – hat, gloves, socks.

Superman.

But sometimes, you simply have to run. San Francisco is blessed with several generations of public transit – cable cars, streetcars, trolley buses and the Muni light rail system. I had to dodge the last three as I ran hell for leather across Steuart Street, for I had spotted Superman all of 100 yards away, the lights were changing and he was heading for his car. Narrowly saving the taxpayers of the City by the Bay a multi-million dollar lawsuit as I avoided an oncoming streetcar, I beat the world and Olympic records for the 100 yard dash to get close enough. The Man of Steel gave me one backward glance before getting in the car and that’s all I needed.

Sometimes you just have to run ….

All snaps on the Panasonic G1 with the 14-45mm kit lens set at 18mm and auto-everything at ISO320.