OWS comes to SF.
Remarkable peace prevails at the OWS encampment on the Embarcadero at the Ferry Building in San Francisco.
G3, kit lens @14mm, 1/100. f/9, ISO 320.
Three or four police cars were in evidence but their drivers were too occupied with the donuts and coffee on this chilly morning to bother harassing the peaceful protesters.
G3, kit lens @18mm, 1/50, f/9, ISO320
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.
Yer basic Irish boozer.
G3, kit lens @19mm, 1/50, f/4,3. ISO320.
On Sacramento Street, San Francisco.
Second and Howard, SF.
G3, kit lens @33mm, 1/125, f/5,4. ISO320.
The Italian dishes here are outstanding, and sitting on the sidewalk is always fun.
Service? Northern Italian rude. Whatever. The food is great.
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.