Category Archives: Photographs

Street hype

Photographs

There’s one born every minute.

I came across a ridiculous piece of advertising the other day. It claims to teach class participants how to take street photographs. For the best part of two grand you get to meet a self-proclaimed ‘famous photographer’ who then pats you on the ass, sends you out to record your theme of the day in a big city and then graciously spends 30 minutes of his precious time with you ‘critiquing’ your snaps. Well, at $2000+ per hour, which is what his rate for a medium sized class comes to, I would be spending my even more valuable time with you too, and my trashing of your work – guaranteeing that you would have to sign up for a refresher course – would be at no extra charge.

I will never understand the concept of tuition which purports to teach you to see. Seeing is like musical or business talent. It’s a right brain function. You either have it or you do not. Technique, like any left brain function, can be learned, seeing cannot. You may, perhaps, sharpen your visual sense by using it more, but it’s still binary. It’s either there or it’s missing. It cannot be bought.

Thankfully for the world’s gear makers, the total disconnect between gear and vision allows them to sell tons of equipment to people most of whom really should be taking up other hobbies more suited to their skills. Like Morris Dancing or crochet. Just check any of the more popular chat boards to see what I’m talking about. The average participant there changes gear more frequently than a politician changes his mind yet cannot take a picture to save his life.

Anyway, here are a few recent street snaps and, whether you like them or not, this most ephemeral of art forms most certainly did not cost me the big bucks demanded by that ‘famous photographer’. Actually, my cost was a train ticket and a sandwich for lunch, plus some shoe leather.

Click the picture for the PDF download.

All snapped on the Panny G1 with the kit lens, the first in Monterey, the remainder in San Francisco.

Now please excuse me while I rattle up some business at $2,000+ per hour. There truly is one born every minute, and he really needs to have his wallet lightened.

SOMA

Architecture

One of SF’s most photogenic areas.

During the dot-com boom, the area South of Market Street (SOMA) in San Francisco saw rents skyrocket as legions of code monkeys sought to become the next Google. Most crashed and burned spectacularly in April, 2000 and the tech stock market has not remotely recovered in the decade since. Such are speculative bubbles.

Not that this was bad. The San Mateo bridge to Oakland is once more drivable thanks to the lane added too late for the boom and rents in SOMA have come back down from the nosebleed levels seen during the bubble, allowing artists and sculptors and generally creative people to once more return and make the place what it is. There are lots of great print and machine shops here, serving all needs from large posters, custom furniture, metalworking and photographic printing.

And what most typifies SOMA is a vital mix of old buildings made to look new again, vibrant colors, murals, local eateries and all of those great things that constitute a neighborhood.

You can get some sense of what I’m going on about by clicking the picture below, which will download a 3.2mB PDF to your computer. Suffice it to say that all the 22 snaps included were made on one dreary morning between rain showers earlier this week.

Best viewed on an iPad or in Preview on a Mac.

Collections and Slideshows

Lightroom, Photographs

Useful Lightroom tools.

Two powerful tools in Lightroom which perhaps don’t get the recognition they deserve are Collections and Slideshows.

Collections allow you to group selected images in one place, suitably named. No catalog bloat results, as a Collection is simply a set of pointers to existing pictures in your Lightroom catalog.

Collections in Lightroom.

The other day a relative asked for a selection of recent snaps so that she might choose one or two for display in large print format. I simply placed four dozen into a Collection, based on her taste for the simple and uncluttered, then went into the Slideshow module of Lightroom, choosing that Collection for the slideshow.

The Lightroom Slideshow module.

I saved the whole thing in low quality, to keep the files size down, exported it to DropBox and, minutes after receiving the request my relative had a file of proofs for review. The only things I did in the Slideshow module were to add a face page, which you can see below, and numbering, so that she need only report back the identifying numbers of the images she wants printed. The slideshow was saved as a PDF file in 1024 x 768 page size, formatted for her iPad. (The images break up if viewed larger than that).

If you like you can even embed a sound file to accompany the slideshow and can also save the slideshow as a video in a wide variety of sizes and formats. Adobe is totally on the ball here. Be warned that video creation really stresses your CPU and owners of iMacs should think twice before doing this, owing to the atrocious cooling design of those machines. Even the extraordinarily well cooled HackPro I use showed its quad core CPU temperature rising from the usual 115F to 165F when processing the related RAW files into a video, with the process taking 10 minutes. To put that upper temperature in perspective, I have the overheating warning buzzer in the HackPro’s BIOS set at 175F, near the CPU’s service limit, so that’s getting up there. The video, whose delay between slides can be set in the Slideshow module, came in at a whopping 88mB in 720P format.

Don’t try this on an iMac. Dramatic CPU temperature rise when
creating a video in the LR Slideshow module – all four cores shown.

The PDF file is a modest 4mB in size, by comparison, and you can download it by clicking the picture below.

Click to download. Best viewed in GoodReader on the iPad or in Preview on a Mac.