Guaranteed results, every time.

Located at Fourth and Brannan in south east San Francisco, the Caltrain terminus is my destination when taking weekly trips to the city. At a modest cost for the round trip from the Peninsula, including lunch and a revitalized psyche, that’s a whole lot less than visiting a shrink and, unlike that futile exercise, my trip invariable culminates in great memories, food and snaps. And as I take my push bike along, I get fit in the process of riding around the city on the Bay.

Further, I can work at my day job on the trip thanks to the hotspot on the iPhone which gives me roaming wifi and the iPad which gives me a screen I can actually make out. Some of my best investment ideas have originated on such journeys, aided by the good mood that the prospect of street snapping creates and the gentle rocking of the train, which is how man was meant to travel.

And, truth be told, I almost never fail to start the visit off on a high note, as the assembled greeters in the terminus building are a never ending source of wonderful, often moving, images.

Here are some recent ones.

Monochromatic color.

West Mission Street, SF. G3, kit lens.

I had to bring up the green in the foliage, and this demonstrates just how effective the Magic Lasso tool and the ‘Refine Edges’ command are in Photoshop CS5.

Ushering in the new year.

San Mateo, CA. G3, kit lens @18mm.

San Francisco.

By turn strange, surreal, eccentric, colorful, monochromatic and never predictable. San Francisco is all of these, and this is how I saw it over the past twelve months. Unlike my Street Snaps where people are the object of interest, in my Cityscapes people, if they are even present, are part of the broader cityscape.

Click the picture for the slide show.

Mostly snapped on the Panasonic G1 with the kit lens, with the last few on the G3. The little Pannys don’t look like much and I can only express my deep gratitude to the maker for that. Electrician’s tape, used to obscure brand names on the hardware, is a useful adjunct. While one was taken with the 45-200mm Panny zoom, the 14-45mm kit lens really is perfect for this sort of thing and it’s all I carry most of the time. Were it non-interchangeable I would not mind one bit. The G3 adds two stops of grain reduction compared to the G1, so in a pinch I’ll enlarge what I need a bit more without compromising quality too much, and avoid having to carry an extra lens, small as it may be.

A charming display.

Spotted in downtown Carmel, CA.

G3, Olympus 9-18mm @ 18mm, 1/320, f/5.6, ISO1600.

In the land of high-end retail everything sells.

You can see just how diminutive the G3 is in the reflection. Any smaller and it would be hard to hold.

Rather than risking reflections from the camera’s flash, I processed the snap in Photoshop, outlining the birds with the Magic Lasso and bringing them up a tad using the Curves tool.