Category Archives: Photographs

Paris, 1974

Photographs

A magical place.

A friend is leaving for a much deserved spot of R&R in Paris, so I put together some old snaps to get the creative juices flowing.


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If there are many images from the Jardin des Tuileries, I make no apologies for that. After all, why not revel in the most perfect urban setting on earth? The beautiful, bitter sweet fin de siècle piano piece can be found here.

All snapped on my Leica M3, 35mm Summaron, Kodax TriX film. There are 36 images in the slide show, the same number you got on a roll of film back then. These are selected from but three rolls I shot during a one week stay. Film was like that – it discouraged waste.

Paris, je t’aime.

Painted Victorian

Photographs

Exquisite attention to detail.

Click the picture for the location.

Taken on that little wonder, the Nikon Series E 75-150mm zoom. Small, fast, cheap, sharp. What else could you as for? Oh! yes, add a CPU. Ideal for full frame, and for APS-C sensors it makes for an effective range of 112-225mm, at a fixed f/3.5 maximum aperture.

The accuracy of the GPS device I use on the D700 is breathtaking. If you click the picture and switch to Street View, it’s more accurate than I can argue, showing the exact point at which I stood when pointing the camera to the sky.

Out and about with the 28mm Nikkor

Nikon lenses, Photographs

The perfect street snapper.

While the manual focus Nikkors I use lack the immediate response of the later AF optics, they remain a lot of fun to use and the 28mm f/2 Nikkor N.C. doesn’t need that much focusing in any case, owing to an extended depth of field at all but the largest apertures. They are also far better made than the current optics, making the whole experience a pleasure. The 28mm f/2 is a chunky piece and melds nicely with the far from svelte D700 body. The following snaps use my tailored lens correction profile which you can download here. I use it with Lightroom 4; it works equally well in Photoshop.

I set to it the other day and took but this one lens with me, hitting the streets of San Francisco, as usual. The 28mm is arguably the ideal street snapper – not too long, not too short – and the f2 speed will handle just about anything you will encounter.

Lunch break in the Castro District.

Thee World’s Smallest Side Show. On Castro Street.

In addition to a particular lifestyle, you will see a lot of dogs in the Castro District.

More pups. At f/2.

Noticeboard in the vibrant Castro community. French lessons to massages ….

Mission District muralist. A team of six friends was working on this
mural. This was the team leader, and he told me they had been at it all day.
They remove the spray tips from the aerosol cans to get a sharper line.
Here they are filling in the rough sketch.

The Taqueria on Mission at 25th Street makes divine food.
This little boy was enjoying his meal. Snapped at f/2.
A face straight out of Goya‘s oeuvre – questioning and tragic.

Lovely window light at La Taqueria. At f/2.8.
The lens profile fixes the corner shading. Click the picture.

Late evening light catches a hopeful fisherman at the Bay Bridge

The 28mm f/2 pre-Ai Nikkor N.C. is a crackerjack lens. A thrill to use. My multicoated version (hence the “C” in the designation) renders very contrasty images on the D700, needs no stopping down for even big prints, has a lovely feel and heft and just seems made for the modern full frame Nikon DSLR. Not bad for a 40+ year old optic.

Francis Bacon

Paintings

A dark modernist.

No painters used photography more than Degas, David Hockney and Francis Bacon (1909-1992). For the last, it was the source of much of his output of dark, brooding, tortured canvases, familiar to all. I doubt that his personality was captured better than by the expressionist photographer Bill Brandt in this powerful portrait:

Bacon’s foundation has just released a free e-book on the painter, his studio and his use of photography, well explained in the first of the two included videos. You can read more about it here, whence you can download it to your iPad at no cost. The book is an example of where art publishing is headed and is beautifully done.

A snap over lunch

About the Snap, Street portraits

A picture of a fine man with his first born.

A happy, modern Pietà.

Date: May 11, 2012
Place: Rosamunde on Mission Street
Modus operandi: Looking forward to a cool beer
Weather: Parisian morning sun
Time: 12:39:44
Gear: Nikon D700, 50mm f/1.4 MF Nikkor-S
GPS: Click the image.
Medium: Digital
Me: A lovely man with a divine baby
My age: 60

I was traipsing around San Francisco’s Mission District, enjoying the locals and the murals, when hunger did its thing and directed me to the Rosamunde Sausage Grill on Mission at 24th for a pint and a sausage. After trying mightily to engage the very attractive barmaid in idle banter, and failing miserably, I opted instead for the Ninkasi ‘Spring Reign’ blonde ale, and got to chatting with a fellow diner in the welcoming beer cellar setting. The sausage of choice was a fiery Andouille, with the beer serving as fire extinguisher.

Bruce had a very small baby strapped to his chest and was a delightful companion. Handsome, open, with a straight gaze, a ready laugh and a natural curiosity, we got to chatting. He related that he was selling his restaurant down the road to concentrate fully on bringing up the baby. Spotting the Nikon dangling in that insouciant way from my shoulder, a style that only I can pull off, one thing led to another and he agreed to let me snap a picture of the two of them.

I took a small handful of snaps, composed very tightly, at close to full aperture. I lucked out in keeping both Bruce’s eyes (stolen, clearly, from Cary Grant) and the baby’s head and eyelashes sharp. Natural light from the adjacent window provides gentle modeling.

Bruce with his son, Oliver. D700, 50mm f/1.4 Nikkor-S at f/2. Click the picture.

For those readers who might understandably have questioned my sanity in fine tuning the focus indicator for this lens, the proof of the pudding is above. The eyes and child’s lashes are critically sharp, whereas the father’s chin is already blurred.

A friend with better eyes than mine, not to mention a knowledge of Hindu, relates that the father’s T Shirt is emblazoned with the word ‘Om‘. How apt.

The related large print is in the mail to Bruce as you read this.

Here’s the ‘contact strip’ from Lightroom: