Yummy!
A few from San Francisco’s Fisherman’s Wharf the other day:
Famous Fishwich.
Crab boiling.
Clam chowder.
Waiter.
At the crab store.
Maritime Store.
Fishing Boat.
All on the D700 with the 28mm f/2 MF Nikkor, except the last where I used the 105mm f/2.5 Nikkor.
The joy of childhood.
Few things evoke such joy as seeing children enjoying the cool, crisp air on Christmas Eve, all warmly bundled up. These were snapped in San Francisco yesterday.
Here was my walkabout – the Nikon D2x never misses on GPS locations, compared with the D700 which has at best a 70% hit rate, returning a blank the rest of the time.
All on the D2x with the 85/1.8 and 180/2.8 AF-D Nikkors at or near full aperture.
A very British glamour.
It’s fitting that this book of Norman Parkinson’s images for Vogue and Queen has his wife Wenda on the cover. As he relates:
“Whatever style and elegance might be attributed to my work, most of it was Wenda Rogerson’s influence”.
And style and elegance are abundantly present in Parkinson’s work. What distinguishes this book from other Parkinson tomes I have featured here is that finally a real and successful effort has been made to reproduce his colour work properly. In 1981 he said:
“I’ve been slowly slipping out of black and white and now I only take it under sufferance as a sort of back-up to my color snaps”. Thank goodness for that because his color work is a standout.
It’s a splendid book and shows well how he transitioned from the more formal monochrome work of the ’40s to his great color images in the ’70s. Recommended, regardless of your interest in fashion. My copy ran under $20 from a remaindered bookseller but even at Amazon it’s a bargain.
Smooth Lightroom integration.
One really handy feature in the Nikon D2/D3/D4 bodies is the ability to record a voice memo of up to sixty seconds in length for each image. After enabling the function in Settings, you hold the voice memo button down while speaking into the microphone on the rear of the body. If you are taking posed snaps of strangers and want to send them a copy as a courtesy, this is a great way of recording their email address for later retrieval.
At first I thought this to be a worthless gimmick but in practice am finding it to be a really useful feature on my D2x.
You can playback the voice memo using the camera’s small speaker to check it’s intelligible at the time of recording.It sounds far better over your computer’s speakers!
When it comes to processing, Lightroom fully accommodates this function. The WAV file recording has the same frame number as the image but with a ‘.wav’ file extension and is imported along with the image into LR 2, 3 and 4.
You can see the sound file in the Library module of Lightroom and you can play it back by clicking the arrowed icon:
A like feature is also available on some Canon DSLR bodies.
File sizes? A 10 second recording averages 75MB – not enough to worry about when it comes to consuming precious space on your camera’s CF or SD card. The D2 and D4 use one CF card, the D3 one or two CF cards.
Greek revival on a grand scale.
The Palace of Fine Arts in San Francisco’s Marina District is a Greek revival structure built in 1915 for the Pan-Pacific Exhibition. There’s an interesting history at Wikipedia where the original structure can be seen in a contemporary monochrome panoramic shot.
It’s rather incongruous, way too large for the site and sort of in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by high priced residential buildings which rather crowd it out. But it’s a fun trip to visit this monumental piece, with its rotunda and beautiful lagoon.
Greek revival fluted column.
Lone tree.
Pink.
The scale is monumental.
Lone tourist.
Cellular snap.
Snapped on the D700 using the 16-35G and 35-70 AFD lenses.