I tried to think of a good analogy for what it was like to capture this image. I was trying to nail focus on the eyes of a very active, constantly moving child, using a 50mm lens set at f/1.4 on a manual-focus camera. I was shooting from only a few feet away. My analogy [...]
My wife bought a red dress for my granddaughter, Eva, to wear at Christmas. Here it is hanging on the closet door. I resolved to get a photo of Eva wearing the dress, but with a three-year-old, that requires some planning and patience. We decided to try for a day a few days before Christmas, [...]
I'm not keen on photographing people wearing masks, and approaching strangers right now makes one even more apprehensive than usual. So, I'm foregoing street photography and instead am photographing buildings in monochrome. Here are four SF landmarks, taken over a couple of weekends. The Palace of Fine Arts is a good subject in just about [...]
According to its official website, "The town of Colma is known worldwide as 'The City of Souls.'" That's because it has 1,500 residents and 1.5 million "souls" in its 16 cemeteries. I went there early on a Sunday to photograph the cemeteries in monochrome. Driving around among the tombstones and mausoleums was stressless and enjoyable, [...]
I've been to Yosemite a couple of dozen times, but not for a few years. I traveled to Wawona in early November for three days for a family event, which meant this was not a dedicated photo trip. But I did have my monochrome camera and a 28mm fixed-lens color camera. I shot with both, [...]
I found a bench I could isolate against the sky, and thought it would be a good monochrome subject. So I took this shot. Graphic, but too simple. I added a person and tried a couple of poses. Better, but not yet there. I decided a symmetrical composition would work, so I tried the following [...]
I drove to Lakeshore Avenue in Oakland this past weekend, intending to look for street photos there, but when I arrived, I saw there were lots of booths set up around the shore of Lake Merritt. Apparently, every weekend since the pandemic started, this has been taking place: kind of an ad hoc street [...]
This post is an outlier because there's just one photo, and it's not monochrome. This is Eva, my granddaughter, last weekend, wearing the new hat and shirt my wife bought for her in San Diego. To try something different, I put a border around it in Lightroom that makes it look matted. The portrait technique [...]
I was walking around Balboa Park in San Diego near sunset, looking for street photos, and finding nothing worth shooting. I took one last walk down the main pathway and, at the end, found a woman practicing what I later found out, by talking to her, are her circus routines. In a strong eastern European [...]
Here are two photos of the Immaculata Church on the campus of the University of San Diego. Neither one shows the church as you'd see it if you went there, because one is black and white and the other infrared. I went to the church at sunrise, but the light was wrong: It's a sunset [...]