Lazy afternoon.
Fresno Street at Romolo Street, San Francisco. Click the image for the map.
Nikon D3x, 35mm f/1.4 Nikkor G.
Catching the rays
Fresno Street at Romolo Street, San Francisco. Click the image for the map.
All posts by Thomas Pindelski
Fresno Street at Romolo Street, San Francisco. Click the image for the map.
Winston is eleven
The Hemmings lens at work.
For his annual portrait this year, Winnie insisted on doing the bug-eyed staring thing, though the bright strobe makes things a bit tricky. I sent the lad outside into the bright sun to get acclimated!
Winnie is 11!
The simulated window lighting could hardly be simpler. One Novatron head in a gold umbrella, to the right and above my right shoulder. I make it high enough to get a smidgeon of spill light on top of the hair. This was the first serious outing for my newly machined Hemmings lens, but be careful. Get too close and you might cut yourself.
Nikon D3x, 85mm f/1.8 pre-Ai Nikkor-H at f/5.6, one Novatron head. You can have the current plastic fantastic D or G AF versions for two or three times as much, but you will never know what an optical and mechanical masterpiece is like to hold and use if you go that route. I continue to use the remote strobe radio trigger I cobbled together for a couple of hamburgers some 6 years ago and it has yet to disappoint. Beats on-camera cables any day. I also use a small white balance card in a test snap to properly render skin tone.
Yeah, yeah, tell me all you like about modern optics:
More details on this landmark optic appear here.
Scenic Lives
Late shadows.
Vallejo Street at Grant Avenue, North Beach, San Francisco.
Nikon D3x, 35mm f/1.4 Nikkor G.
The Luncheon
The most photographic of painters.
A friend in London is visiting the Manet show at the Royal Academy and sent over a clandestine snap of The Luncheon. The image below is the real thing.
Manet: The Luncheon, 1868.
Has there ever been a more purely photographic vision in oils? Manet’s genius was that he snapped the image of the haughty, wealthy young diner departing the feast in his mind, only later transferring it to canvas. The modern photographer is spared both the need for genius and of the skill in rendering something similar. Manet used what looks like the equivalent of 24mm lens vision here, albeit using a large aperture to render the waitress blurred.
The no less special The Railway from the National Gallery is also in the show.
Are your images being stolen?
It takes a thief to catch a thief.
It seems incongruous that the arch-thief in American commerce, Google, should have crafted a tool which helps photographers seek out illegal use of their images.
It’s called www.images.Google.com and you have two choices to search for your image on the web:
- Upload a copy of the image to Google
- Input the URL for the image
Now the first approach has to be lunacy. Like giving a fresh needle and loaded syringe to an addict. So I opted for the second and searched for my wolfhound picture:
Absent a couple of non-commercial Tumblr illict reproductions – hardly of concern – one cropped up where the schmuck who stole my picture was using it to advertise his tweed clothing on eBay.UK (shock news that eBay might actually be involved in providing a conduit for theft).
So I wrote to the son of an unmarried mother in simple terms:
You may wish to use the thieves’ tool to catch thieves yourself.
Follow-up Feb 16, 2013: The thief has now taken my image off his site. May he rot in hell.