I had an "assignment" from a group of photographers I meet with to take three street portraits. I went to a couple of locations in the past few weeks, but didn't come away with any portraits I liked. In one case, I didn't get any at all. So I went to the Embarcadero in San [...]
I got many images I liked from this march, mainly because I learned some helpful lessons from shooting previous marches: If you can get in the middle of the march and walk backwards, shooting people's faces, the photos have a lot more impact than ones you get standing on the sidelines. A bigger or brighter [...]
I went into San Francisco late in the afternoon (3:30) last week to do some street photography. The challenge was trying to use my normal street settings in low light. I normally dial in f/11, 1/250s, Auto ISO, and focus at 6 feet on my 35mm lens—but very quickly, as the light disappeared, I had [...]
At the fair, there are thousands people in leather and chains, with tattoos, who are showing plenty of skin, so you think you're going to easily get lots of keepers. Doesn't work out that way—at least not for me. I arrived around 11, when the fair opens, found a decent background, and stayed there for [...]
Last Sunday the Calle 24 Latino Cultural District held an event in San Francisco called Fiesta de las Americas to "celebrate the independence of various Latin American countries and commemorate the culture, arts and music found from Patagonia to the Artic Circle." It was in the Mission District on 24th Street between Bryant and Folsom. At [...]
The views and the people on the Embarcadero make it a great photo destination. I was there just after sunrise on Saturday and took advantage of both possibilities. This is a photographer who sells his work across from the Ferry Building. I've talked with him a couple of times. He was taking drone shots over [...]
I've photographed so many strangers on the street that I have enough images for it to be an ongoing, if somewhat desultory, project. So here's the next photo for my Photographing Strangers project. This is Clint. He was standing on the corner of Market and 5th Streets in San Francisco. He was nicely dressed, [...]
At the suggestion of one of the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, whom I met by chance in Oakland, I went into SF on Sunday to photograph the Up Your Alley event on Folsom and a couple of other streets. The bright, sunny day wasn't a problem for the monochrome camera like it is for [...]
I went into Oakland early last Sunday to beat the heat. My plan was to photograph the skyline from across Lake Merritt. I took some average skyline photos, then drove a short ways to be able to shoot the courthouse from across the lake—like this. The rower helps. Back at my car, I spotted a [...]
The streets in Chinatown in San Francisco are crowded during the Flower Fair, which takes place the weekend before Chinese New Year. That makes it hard to get a clean composition. I got only a few semi-keepers from a couple of hundred photos, and even for those, I thought there was too much going on [...]