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.