Light and shadow

More photos with taken with the N80. I took these all on the same day in Soho without really having a theme in mind, but after looking at them they seem to come together.

Leaves and sunlight

This photo was a bit of an experiment to see how a high-contrast scene would come out with T-Max 400 film, since the leaves in the foreground were in shade and the sunlight striking the white building in the background was very bright. Not too bad, and the texture on the leaves turned out well.

Shadow #1

This is the shadow from some kind of metal sculpture (looks like a rabbit I guess) by the sidewalk. I found the shadow it made on the building behind more interesting than the sculpture itself. 

Shadow #2

By the Bay

When you go sightseeing in San Francisco, of course you have to go to Fisherman's Wharf.

Harbour

Wheels

A wheel from a paddle steamer?

San Francisco Bay fog

This isn't Fisherman's Wharf, but when we came back from Muir Woods on the ferry from sunny Sausalito, we ran into the wall of fog that had been covering San Francisco during our stay there. This is an attempt to capture that feeling!

Cable cars

New York doesn't have cable cars, but San Francisco does! It turned out to be harder than I expected to take photos from a moving cable car: for one thing, using a telephoto lens one-handed is pretty awkward. Shutter priority at 1/200s and ISO 200 gave an aperture of f/13, which still turned out to be not quite enough sometimes.

All downhill from here

This is the best of all the cable car shots that I took, since it's just starting its descent it stands out nicely against the sky. My focus was slightly off though, the road turned out sharper than the car.

Bay windows

These windows caught my eye on the way up, getting rid of the surrounding jumble ended up with a squarish crop. Not a great photo but there's something about it I like.

Soho portraits

I just picked up prints from a roll of film I took over the past few weeks with the Nikon N80. This time I was using Kodak T-Max 400 rather than the T-Max 100 I was using for the first roll, and with more latitude in exposure I could be more adventurous. As with last time I took my time trying to get the best shot for each frame, and I think a reasonable number turned out at least halfway decent.

Before starting to write this post I had a feeling that I don't post many photos of people, but going back and checking, there are more than I thought, so that's not really true. However, the following two are unusual: since I asked the subjects beforehand, they're actual portraits. Thanks to the courage I'd worked up in the street photography workshop last month I didn't hesitate!

Guys in sunglasses

These two guys were waiting on a street corner. Though they were standing together they just seemed to be watching the crowd. When I asked if I could take a photo of them they said sure, what should we do? Do what you were doing, I said.

Man and his dog

This one was a lucky chance, I was planning to take a photo of this guy enjoying his cigarette from further away but even a zoom lens to 80mm wasn't going to get very close, so there was nothing for it but to ask for permission. That allowed me to get just close enough.

More to come ...

Muir Woods

While in San Francisco we took a day trip out to Muir Woods to see the redwoods. Usually I photograph city scenes so this was quite a departure! For the first hour or two it was cloudy but eventually the sun came out, though it didn't make that much difference in taking photos down on the forest floor, where it was much darker than I was expecting.

To the sky

Small leaves and large trees

Giants

Blue and green

Forest stream

I had great hopes for this photo since the mixture of sunlight and shadow on the bed of the stream turned out very nicely, but it ended up coming out unfocused. The shadows are not bad, though. 

Crow

It wasn't really clear what this crow was doing at the entrance, other than waiting to be photographed, but it attracted a lot of attention.

Wide angles

As I mentioned in a previous post, I've been experimenting with the wide end of my zoom lens recently. When I'm walking around talking photos I use a 50mm-equivalent lens most of the time, switching to the zoom when I need a longer focal length, but I haven't really been using the wider angles much until now. Lately I'm trying out shooting at 18mm, with three separate aims in mind: capturing converging lines, getting a greater feeling of perspective, and increasing the size and impact of foreground objects relative to the background. With lots of tall buildings in New York, converging lines are the easiest!

Skyscraper

Convergence

More wide angle shots to come!

San Francisco art

Public art near the San Francisco Bay Bridge.

Municipal art

San Francisco

Last week I was in San Francisco on a business trip, but I took photos whenever I had a free moment.

Perspective

I was in a hurry so I couldn't spend as long taking this shot as I wanted, after I looked at it laster I knew it would have come out better with more feet in the picture.

Chinatown 

Federal Reserve

About two weeks ago I had an epiphany reading a photography book when I realised that wide angles are about converging lines (among other things, of course). That's hardly an original thought, but expect to see more converging lines here in the future!

Two piers

New York Botanical Garden

On Independence Day we took a trip out to the New York Botanical Garden, next to the Bronx Zoo.

Conservatory

Reflections again, using a circular polariser to get a deep blue sky.

Getting the sky to be blue mystified me when I got a DSLR last year. With a point-and-shoot I had learned to be very careful not to shoot into the sun to avoid having the foreground in shadow. Metering on the DSLR took care of the shadow problem but left me with greenish, washed-out skies, and it was a while before I realised that it was because I had forgotten the perils of shooting into the sun. I've relearned that lesson, but a circular polariser mitigates it to an extent and gives bluer skies overall. Using a reflector to increase the light on a foreground subject relative to the background would help as well, but so far I've been put off by the inconvenience of carrying one (I'm a lazy photographer).

Stone Mill

An average shot of the Stone Mill on the Bronx River that runs through the garden, but the framing turned out nicely. Built in 1840!

Sunrise from the Brooklyn Bridge

Over the long weekend I got up early on Sunday morning to see the sunrise on the east side of Manhattan. Compared to the last time I took sunrise photos it was pleasantly warm, even though the sun came up at 5:30 it was 21 degrees Celsius! I headed out to the middle of the Brooklyn Bridge, I had been planning to see how the sun lit up the office buildings in Lower Manhattan but the view over the Manhattan Bridge turned out to be the main attraction.

High finance

Pretty soon after starting to take photos I realised there was a problem that I hadn't anticipated: because of the cars passing over the bridge it shakes almost continuously, which made the tripod I had brought along useless. I took this photo with the tripod and it turned out blurry, so objectively it's a failure, but I'm still pleased with the way it turned out. (The Statue of Liberty is on the lower left.)

First glimpse

Once the sun started coming up I realised I should have paid attention to the weather forecast, since it was much cloudier than I'd been hoping for (it rained later in the day). Last time I observed that zoomed shots generally turned out better than wide-angle ones, so this time I tried to keep the number of elements in the frame small and focus in on the most colourful bit of the sky. I also reduced the exposure to darken the sky and reduce the foreground to a silhouette. This photo is from 5:47.

Full glory

At 6:05 I got an unobstructed shot of the sun rising.

Threatening clouds

Taken at 6:16, the sun is about to go behind the clouds and end the show.

Bryant Park

More photos taken with the N80, this time from around Bryant Park, near the New York Public Library.

Baroque

Tree in the city

Zigzag

This photo isn't so great, but I have been aiming to take photos featuring diagonals for a while! It's a nice coincidence that the guy is at the end of a zigzag line so that your eye follows from the foreground back to where he's sitting, I didn't plan it that way.

I'm still trying to put my finger on precisely what it is, but there's something about the film photos I've been taking that isn't quite there in a lot of my black-and-white digital photos. It may be the tones, or it may be the extra effort I've been putting into taking each photo when shooting with film that's producing a better result, or something else entirely. Either way, so far it's been quite satisfying.

Series

Something that caught my eye on Astor Place this weekend. I'd noticed this building before but it was the first time I really stopped to take a proper look at it.

Receding reflection