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.

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.

Looking back.

It’s proving a bit of a mad dash for the finish line, but come December 31, 2012 I believe that the column count here for the year will be exactly 366. One a day, though if you go to the bottom of the page and click on ‘Archives’ you will see that August and September were dry months, so I have been in catch-up mode since. This has been a healthy thing to do as all of those ‘catch-up’ pieces had been swirling about in my noggin for quite a while so I am clearing the decks, so to speak.

I rambled back through the year and highlight below a few of the most enjoyable pieces, which I divide below into the three eponymous categories in the name of this journal. Photographs – my snaps, Photographers – about other workers in the field, and Photography – technical matters.

Photographs:

January 31 – The Abduction. This extraordinary ‘found image’, in the style of Marcel Duchamp almost, is so special that I would understand were you to accuse me of staging it. But no, that’s exactly how it was, waiting to be snapped on Osgood Place in lovely Jackson Square, San Francisco. It was so evocative that I took pen to paper and wrote a short story to go with it.

March 7 – The Nikkor 500mm f/8N AI Reflex lens is possibly one of Nikon’s most abused and ill-used optics. It is special in every way and I set out to show how to get the best out of it here. I was so irritated about the ineptness of users’ comments all over the web, reflecting nothing more than poor technique, that I really went to town on this one.

March 6 – A simple snap named Pachino brought with it a flood of imagination and memories, resulting in another short story to accompany the picture.

March 13 – Alcatraz was the destination for a day trip with my boy and it’s almost impossible to make bad pictures there, though I saw many giving it a good try.

March 24 – White Birches saw me reminiscing about my time with God. Seldom have I had so much fun writing a short story.

April 6 – Six in sixty and one-twenty saw a raw fecundity of output in two minutes with a very wide lens.

April 19 – A face at the window showed the benefits of carrying a light and inexpensive zoom along for the trip.

Photographers:

Feb 13 – Donald Jean shared his gorgeous Venetian photographs with readers. Thank you Donald for your outstanding photography.

March 21 – The NYT’s Lens blog did an arresting piece on 1950s images of dirigibles.

March 28 – Englishman Martin Parr cannot be accused of good taste, doing a number pretty much on anyone he photographs, with hard flash and poses which often ridicule. But this modern imitator of Wegee is worth a look.

April 22 – Photography in Mexico was an enthralling show at SF’s MOMA.

Photography:

January 2 – Fringale. At the conclusion of 2011 I made a commitment to share my dining places with readers who might be thinking of visiting the closest thing to Paris in America, San Francisco, a city I photograph weekly. Fringale was the first such in 2012, to be followed by many others.

January 15 – My Desk laid it all bare and disclosed the less than ordered work space in my home office. It doesn’t look much better today.

January 26 – Midnight in Paris is Woody Allen’s luminous tribute to the Paris of Gertrude Stein and nothing better was made for the cinema in 2012.

February 7 – Legacy Nikon lenses was a real Trojan Horse. Little did I suspect that this piece would take me on a tremendous odyssey of rediscovery of old MF Nikkors which I used in my youth, borrowed from my employer, Dixons, in the UK when I was still in short trousers. I ended the year owning all of the lenses in that piece and many more.

March 11 – The Nikon D700 and Geotagging was the tale of my determination to confer competent GPS data on my Nikon snaps. It proved successful and far lower cost and better designed than Nikon’s clunky solution.

March 17 – Adding a CPU to MF Nikkor lenses – Part II was the culmination of a massive technical exercise into ‘chipping’ old Nikkors. The benefits are huge, the costs minimal.

March 26 – ACR lens profiles saw me start publishing lens profiles for all the MF Nikkors I was acquiring. These have proved popular with old lens aficionados, looking to get the best out of their lenses.