Category Archives: Photographs

Street men

Photographs, Street portraits

Down, but not out.

The ethics here are simple. I make a generous donation then ask if I can snap their picture. If they refuse, fine, we part on good terms. In practice they are almost always happy to pose. A lively chat invariably ensues, they fascinated by my English accent, I by their stories.

All on the Nikon D3x with the Nikkor 16-35G lens at the f/4 full aperture.

Best of 2012

Photographs

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.

Columns of the year 2012 – Part 3 of 3

Photographers, Photographs, Photography

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.