May 2022

Three Artist Portraits

By |2022-05-13T00:08:34+00:00May 13th, 2022|Uncategorized|

My group of portrait photographers recently got the assignment to photograph artists working in a building in Marin County that's dedicated to artist studios. I visited three artists there, and did environmental portraits of them in their studios. Two of the spaces had very good natural light, and even the third had acceptable lighting. I [...]

January 2022

Granddaughters in Color

By |2022-01-14T00:58:38+00:00January 14th, 2022|Uncategorized|

I know this is primarily a site for black and white photography, but I DO have a color camera and mostly shoot my grandkids with that. It also has the advantages of being an autofocus camera, which my monochrome camera is not, and has a fixed 28mm lens, which gives me a better chance of [...]

September 2021

Better Than Posed

By |2021-09-04T20:10:54+00:00September 4th, 2021|Uncategorized|

I like the defocused background that comes with shooting at wide apertures, but the shallow depth of field means it's tricky to get the exact plane you want in focus to be in focus. That's especially true when shooting with a short telephoto—which, for me, is 75mm—at a wide aperture—f/2—with the subject a few feet [...]

June 2021

Portraits of a Tailor

By |2021-06-28T01:15:20+00:00June 28th, 2021|Uncategorized|

Carlos has been my tailor for years, and we see each other often. When he told me he was planning a website for his business, I volunteered to take some photos of him in his workshop. We agreed that the light coming into his shop from a big picture window was best in the late [...]

May 2021

Four Street Portraits in North Beach

By |2021-05-19T18:58:34+00:00May 19th, 2021|Uncategorized|

Along with the Embarcadero, North Beach in San Francisco is at the top of my list of places to go in the city for street photography. This past Sunday, I walked around for a few hours, and came across several people I had short conversations with before asking if I could take their photo—my standard [...]

Roaming the Tenderloin

By |2021-05-14T22:50:14+00:00May 14th, 2021|Uncategorized|

I know the Tenderloin isn't the most photogenic, or safest, neighborhood in San Francisco. But it borders Civic Center, where I often go to photograph the government buildings and walk up and down Market Street. This past Sunday, instead of heading "down" to Market St., I headed "up" from Civic Center into the Tenderloin. I [...]

January 2021

The Impact of Shallow DOF

By |2021-01-05T22:14:10+00:00January 5th, 2021|Uncategorized|

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 [...]

December 2020

The Red Dress

By |2020-12-26T19:49:11+00:00December 26th, 2020|Uncategorized|

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, [...]

August 2020

Performer in the Park

By |2020-08-29T22:58:29+00:00August 29th, 2020|Uncategorized|

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 [...]

April 2020

Going Beyond Selfies

By |2020-04-04T19:32:26+00:00April 4th, 2020|Uncategorized|

When you're stuck at home, as we all are, and you can't go out and shoot people on the street—because there are no people on the street—and your wife begs off being your model, who ya gonna shoot? Yourself. That's your only option. So here are some selfies that I hope go beyond just selfies. [...]

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