A Bloke Mucking About The Castro

For a compilation of the morning walk images, click here.

The Village: I decided to mail a letter at the Castro post office and to enjoy the welcomed appearance of the sun at the end of a dark and dreary morning. My 35mm 7artisans 35mm was the lens of choice, and since it had already proven its penchant for slight color shifts, decided to just play with different levels of color saturation and create some images that might be a little more "festive".

Dinosaurs In The Window: I made this photo of a infant-friendly plush animal mobile in a window of a shuttered specialty store. I have a soft spot for dinosaurs and frogs, and love them as much as I love puppies and birdies, and yes, sometimes kitties too. I can't help but grin at this comic representation of a baby Tyrannosaurus Rex. If I was a little plush Brontosaurus, I'd be really scared.

I was curious to see if this lens was indeed sharp, so I zoomed in on the eye, which was my point of focus. I was amazed that this shot, made through the glass windows, showed the lens to be sharper than I had expected, and more than adequate for its role as a leisure lens on a leisure body.

I'm still not wild about the 50mm equivalent focal length, and still think its field of view is too narrow for my tastes. Alas, the 25mm lens hasn't made it across the Pacific Ocean yet, and since I was late to the purchasing party, got stuck at the very end of the customer line. Based on this particular photo, I hope all the 7artisans lenses are equally sharp, as they are certainly handy and inexpensive.

Harvey: Reminders of Supervisor Harvey Milk (1930-1978) are everywhere in the Castro, and this mural, painted on the side of the restaurant I knew as the Cafe San Marco, shows him as a cross between Mario Savio and George Washington. I mentioned in a earlier post that I knew Harvey and frequented his camera store. I sensed his greatness even then.

Bokeh To You Too, Bud! Bokeh is a term often used in the evaluations of these manual-focus wonders. It is the umami of the photography, a difficult-to-define quality, something you recognize but cannot accurately describe. In short, it's a way to value the rendition of the out-of-focus backgrounds using words like creamy, smooth, and blurry. This lens does a good job in the background department.

Just so you know: SFUSD stands for San Francisco Unified School District. The historic street lamp globe belongs to the school district and not to the city proper. I'm not sure why they felt the need to identify it so, but there you have it.

From the Web. Citations will follow

A contributing factor to quality bokeh is the lens's 9-bladeed diaphragm, which gives an aperture that is more circular than polygonal. This tends to enhance this desired blurry effect. Automated lens often reduce the number of aperture blades to decrease the time it takes for the lens to transition from a "open aperture" to the smaller "shooting aperture" just prior to exposure.

You can see in this illustration a lens with six aperture blades (left) and one with eight blades (right) By all rights the eight-bladed lens would produce better bokeh, and has contributed to the popularity of the 7artisans manual lenses which have nine to fourteen.

While on my walk, I found out that my 55mm 1.4 lens had just been delivered, so I will comment on it as soon as I get a chance.