You wanna piece of me?
Click, you’re on camera.
Date: April 1, 2012
Place: Columbus Avenue, near Broadway, San Francisco.
Modus operandi: Happy to still have all my teeth.
Weather: Warm afternoon sun.
Time: 3:54:27
Gear: Nikon D700, 20mm f/3.5 MF Nikkor Ai-S
GPS: Click the image.
Medium: Digital
Me: “If your pictures are not good enough, you are not close enough”.
My age: 60
Jason Statham‘s brother is on the right.
Mmmmm ….
A lovely, funny memory of a special place.
Date: April 1, 2012
Place: In the City Lights alleyway between Chinatown and Little Italy, San Francisco.
Modus operandi: Looking forward to a visit to City Lights to find myself.
Weather: Warm afternoon sun.
Time: 2:58:07
Gear: Nikon D700, 20mm f/3.5 MF Nikkor Ai-S
GPS: Click the image.
Medium: Digital
Me: A magic moment, luckily caught in a shaft of sun.
My age: 60
Just a delight to use.
I rambled on about the old MF Nikkor 20mm f/3.5 lens I picked up the other day here. Autofocus is really not missed at this focal length and such vignetting and distortion as there is can be easily corrected using the tailored lens profiles I provide here.
So the other day when a break in our unusually rainy weather opened up, I shot off to the city with the 20mm bolted on to the D700 (‘bolted on’ seems in keeping with that body’s macho ethos) and I thought it might also be fun to try out that little GPS logger and receiver mentioned yesterday, while I was at it.
I set off boldly heading west on foot along Harrison Street to the Hall of Justice, surrounded (in order of decreasing morality) by mendicants, zonkers, auto bodyshops, cops, whores, pimps, bail bondsmen and criminal lawyers. Firing up the GPS, here’s my out and back route as shown in Lightroom 4’s map module. I headed back after a sandwich at Caffe Roma at Seventh Street, taking Bryant Street:
As seen in LR4. Flags are numbered when the photo count exceeds one.
Hover over a flag in LR4 and you see the snap:
Cursor hovers to disclose picture in LR4.
Until I figure out some way to add a map when the cursor is hovered over an image, you will have to take my word for it that these were snapped on the route shown. And while the area may not be the greatest, there are probably more cops per square mile here than anywhere else in the city. They are needed to protect the shyster lawyers from their abused clients. Thus, it’s actually pretty safe.
The GPS performed very well. There was one small blind spot, maybe half a block long, where no coordinates were recorded (the GPS flag in the D700’s LCD display was extinguished), probably caused by a skyscraper obscuring the satellite, but the data were easily interpolated using LR4’s ‘drop-on-map-to-record’ option. Built up cities with high rises are the severest test. Open countryside is no problem.
The lens acquitted itself well. Fine detail is there in abundance across the frame and a click in LR4 applies the lens profile in cases where the distortion is objectionable. More a fetish than a requirement much of the time, to be honest. Where you see vignetting it has been added by me, not by the lens.
The Endup. Grunge added in Snapseed.
The wave.
Bail bondsmen. My favorite shingle is ‘Ballestrasse’. What could be more appropriate?
Looks like a business divided along ethnic lines – these presumably service Jews, Germans and Italians, respectively.
SOMA Artists Studio. Arrow points the wrong way ….
Green door and wall on Bryant Street.
Plant on Bryant Street.
Yup, that little 20mm is a keeper and is ideal for subjects where sidewalks are narrow and you have no choice but to be close. What I think of as an ‘environmental lens’ and a favorite focal length. And GPS works fine – a couple of dead spots where there was no reception, with coordinates easily backfilled in LR4. The unit is completely unobtrusive and I paid it no attention on this little sojourn. It delivered in (accurate) spades. It nails locations within a couple of yards.
From my favorite place in Yosemite Valley.
Ansel and I had been taking pictures together in Yosemite for several years, but eventually I tired of the genre. I was at a point in life where never seeing another image of Yosemite would leave me a happy man. Ansel would keep dragging me to El Capitan or Bridalveil Fall in the most godawful weather, and just stand there goggling, lumberjack shirt, pot belly and suspenders. Every now and then he would mutter “Far out, man” in between hits on that little hash pipe he carried everywhere. The strange thing was that, even though he was carrying a load of gear, he never actually took any pictures. On the rare occasions he straightened up, he would repair to that smelly darkroom in the log cabin and make more prints from snaps he had made in the same locations decades earlier. As long as I knew him, he photographed nowhere else, ever since he got that suspended sentence for driving with a kilo in the trunk. Only his fame had kept him out of Alcatraz.
“What gives, Ansel?” I asked, as he staggered out of a darkroom by now blue with marijuana fumes. “Far out, man, but you know ….” and here he paused to take another deep hit from that bong he had hand carved in the shape of Half Dome “…. all they want is prints of the old ones even though my gear was crap back then, ’cause I mostly tried to make a living as a barroom pianist and that barely kept me in bread, water and pot, certainly not in the best photo gear. But look, I get $2,500 for these, $3,500 if I yellow them up a bit and make sure to mark them ‘Limited edition 1/5’. I suspect I’ve unloaded about two thousand or so of that limited edition over the years. Hey, man, it’s a living. Gee, this is good stuff. Wanna hit?”.
Ansel dropped by the other day, zonked out of his gourd as usual, clutching a bunch of prints he had just made of those damned white Yosemite birches. When will photographers stop milking this theme? I mean, come on, how many more times in your life do you want to see a snap of a bunch of spindly, butt ugly, emaciated white trees with peeling bark, over printed and over enlarged which some jerk weed has just used $50,000 of gear to replicate for the umpteenth time?
He offered me a toke but I politely declined, seeing as it’s not my thing.
“But I’ll tell you what, Ansel. How about I give you one of my personally autographed white birches? In full color, as that’s not really something you know how to do now, is it? Feel free to stick it any place you like”.
“Far out, man. Like, yeah dude. Birches rock. I’m getting $5,000 for mine now!”
So that’s how Ansel happened to end up with one of my Yosemite snaps on the wall of his rustic cabin. I told the old fart it was hand printed from my 8″ x 10″ Deardorff, made using old growth oaks from Yosemite, and he bought it. And I think he missed the door handle, being higher than a kite at the time. He told me, in the strictest confidence, that he had to augument his energy with a couple of uppers, while in the darkroom, as he was so sick and tired of printing the same images for well over four decades now.
“That’s awesome dude. All my gear is handcrafted by that dude I get messed up with down the valley. Trouble is, he always promises to finish in a month, then when I go to pick the gear up, find he’s forgotten to start, because he was too out of his mind to do anything. My last tripod took him five years to make – said he finally got on with it as he was out and needed the money for a new stash. I was gonna offer him some of mine but reckoned that would add another year to the wait”.
White birches. Off New Montgomery Street, Yosemite. D700, 35-70 AF D.
