Category Archives: Photographs

7 Pleasures

A hint of the eastern Mediterranean.

G3, kit lens @30mm, 1/500, f/4.5, ISO 320

Insane dynamic range here. One of those cases where a larger sensor would have better withstood the need for selective processing of the shadows. Exposure was for the highlights – once those burn there’s no way of bringing them back.

At Commercial and Leidesdorff Streets in SF’s financial district.

Google Art Project

Exceptional.

I make no bones about my dislike for Google’s ‘anything for a buck’ raison d’être but its Google Art Project, which has been around a couple of years now, is really special. You can wander through the halls of many of the world’s great art collections, manna for photographers and the visully inclined everywhere, and examine these at a level of detail and in simply stunning definition that no docent would ever permit, lest your nose make contact with the hallowed canvas in question.

Here’s a perfect example, Holbein’s extraordinary portrait of Thomas More in the Frick Collection in Manhattan:

Click the picture for the interactive site.

The extent to which you can zoom in, with the image refreshing for ever greater detail, is breathtaking.

MOMA NYC, The Met, The Uffizzi, The Frick, Versailles, The Hermitage – they are all there. Sadly, the Louvre is not.

And you want to feel Van Gogh’s passion in his vase of gladioli? Look no further than his eponymous museum in lovely Amsterdam.

For many viewers these picture are simply too remote to be seen in person. You might argue that the Google Art Project experience is superior. You need Flash to view, so iDevices will not work.

Metropol

Another from the storefront series.

Metropol. G3, kit lens @43mm, 1/250, f/5.6, ISO 1600.

The original needed quite a bit of work, and there was no way of avoiding the utility pole at the time I pressed the button.

Original snap.

Content Aware Fill and the Clone Stamp tool, taken in several small bites, got rid of the lamppost and selective application of Curves lifted the dark interior. On Sutter Street in San Francisco.