The Shoe Mystery Solved?

Sunrise comes later in October. This photo, taken at 7:28 (just 12 minutes after sunrise) reflects the warmth inherent in the early morning light, diffused from the morning clouds, and from a direction closely aligned with the lens axis. I gives a different take on the normal "safety yellow" reflecting strips nailed to this telephone pole. I suspect they were installed by the adjacent homeowner who probably uses them to help him back his car into his garage. 

I was using the 50mm F 2.0 Fuji WR lens on my usual X-E1 body. As is always the case, the lens you need isn't always the lens on your camera, and since I have not abandoned my manual focus pilgrimage, I won't carry a zoom lens. This street shot allowed me to get as close to the reflectors as I wished, so any lens would have done. But even a short telephoto lens will "enlarge" the background, for lack of a better description, and gives the foreground a much better chance of capturing the viewer's attention. The out of focus background has a very creamy appearance, which adds to the implied softness of the light just after dawn. 

I managed to make another photograph my favorite dog "house", but since I was carrying a telephoto lens, I needed to cross the street to get the shot. Normally, I'm standing right in front of the window, doing everything I could to minimize the keyhole effect of shooting at an up angle.

If you look closely, you can see the curved region which is a reflection of the roofline of the house behind me. By shooting from across the street, I actually reduced the amount of glare on the lower portion of the window, and thus protecting our favorite beagle from those blue sky reflections that decreased the contrast in my earlier photos.

I think I know why shoes occasionally appear on my walks. They may be put there for homeless people to take. That makes sense, seeing this is San Francisco.

Switching To A Short Telephoto Lens

Fuji X-E1, 50mm F 2.0 Lens

I am absolved. I have seen the cliché, and I have photographed it. There. It's done. Time to move on.

The morning walk was a little later in the morning, by my standards. The day was a cool, crisp autumn morning awash with bright, clear sunlight. I decided to switch to a  Fuji 50mm 2.0 WR lens, which behaves like a 75mm on a conventional 35mm camera. I was a bit "disoriented" by my earlier walk with a 16mm lens, wider than my usual 25mm, and decided to make it worse by switching to a second lens in so many days.

Working with a longer lens allow me to "get closer" without actually getting closer. Perspectives change, sometimes for the better. For this gargoyle photo, the shot could be made from a greater distance so my shooting angle was much closer to a true horizontal. The results were less perspective distortion, and fewer minutes spent in post production.

After nearly 18 months of manually focusing my lenses, these few mornings in the luxury of autofocusing lenses was a breath of crisp Autumn air. Those manual 7artisans lenses, which I used daily, forced me to adopt and adapt techniques I haven't used since my film days. After years of squinting through the viewfinder of a Pentax SLR, using my cameras at their full performance capabilities was a photographic Valhalla for this old film warrior. This photo was made by reaching over a short, brick wall and holding the camera at arm's length. I used the LCD to compose the image and let the camera focus itself. Easy, peasy, shutter squeezy.

One thing that I've noticed is the number of public art projects initiated by creative, stuck-at-home children. I am all for this creative outlet as long as the painters and sketchers take responsibility for their work and the consequences that may follow. I find chalk a most wonderful medium, primarily because the artist's easel will be wiped clean with the next big rain, when it finally comes.

Spending the morning with a short telephoto lens was indeed refreshing. I could now photography at longer working distances, and my backgrounds took on a soft dreamy look. The 50mm lens wasn't that much heavier than the 25mm I've been carrying, and using autofocus was a real treat. Now comes the problem of deciding what to carry tomorrow.

The Backstreets Of Half Moon Bay

Spent a pleasant morning with my friend Shawn exploring the back streets of Half Moon Bay. Since Shawn is never without a Leica M series camera, I decided to bring a camera too, just in case our brunch turned into a walk-and-shoot around the town, accompanied by a round table discussion for two, as it always does.

Shawn is a serious black and white film photographer, and our discussions have included previsualization of the latent black and white image, something that I never really thought about. Growing up, black and white photography was the economical medium of choice, since all of my extra money went into buying bulk-packed 35mm film loaded into reusable cassettes, and printing only those images that I really liked, and whose expense I could justify. Back then, a little bit of money had to go a long way.

For me, digital photography unleashed a creative urge that lay dormant since the early 1980s. I was in the process of launching a second career, and as such set aside my cameras for lack of anything I was required to photograph. The need would emerge when I took responsibility for producing my school's tri-annual catalog of classes. I started working with color transparency film, creating slides that would be sent to a lithographer for conversion to the  cyan-magenta-yellow-black (CMYK) separations necessary to produce brochure covers in full color.

Eventually every aspect of the catalog was created digitally, and as the need for more detailed documentation increased, so did my inventory of digital cameras. Now, three years into my retirement, I welcome the chance to spend time with Shawn and discuss our shared artistic outlet from a purely recreational standpoint. Advances in digital camera technology have resulted in cameras that can effectively address the nuances of proper exposure, and post production software that help me to salvage images when I mess up. I shoot for myself now, free to indulge my fascination with color, something I could never afford to do when I worked with film.