Lunar New Year Celebration In Millbrae

 
Gung Hay Fat Choy! The Lunar New Year celebrations span several weeks here in the Bay Area. In San Mateo County, it started with a performance at the Hillsdale Shopping Center on Saturday, February 10, and will culminate with the Chinese New Year Parade in San Francisco on Saturday, February 24. The Millbrae event normally follows on the Saturday after the Hillsdale event, but was re-scheduled to Sunday due to inclement weather conditions.

Millbrae Parade, 2020

Year Of The Dragon: I made this photograph during the 2020 celebration, and was hoping to capture a similar photograph of the magnificent dragon. I could not verify its length, but can assure you that it is at least 50 feet long and is tended to by a crew of about 20 Millbrae High School Students.  I was disappointed to hear that the school coordinator of the dragon team had retired, and that nobody has come forward to sponsor the club. Alas, the photo was not to be. Instead, Lion Dance Me provided a mini-dragon of sorts, along with five lion dancing teams, their drummers, and supernumeraries. They initially did their performance on a prepared stage, and you can see the finale a the top of this post.

At the far right you can see one dancer carrying an orb mounted on a staff. This is the Pearl, and it represents wisdom and knowledge. Traditionally, the Dragon is drawn to the Pearl, a metaphor representing the eternal quest for enlightenment.

This year the mini-dragon could easily move among the onlookers, giving everyone an up-close-and-personal encounter with the enchanted beast. I did my best to stay just ahead of the scrum, grabbing photos whenever I could, behaving like a true "run and gun" paparazzi. These six photos were the best of the "near misses" that I made during the Dragon's stroll down Broadway Street. My exposure was manually set to 1/250 of a second, F 16, flash set to full power with a beam spread of about 24mm. This gave me a restricted beam of light with a sharp edge fall off. There was some blown-out details at the edges of the fame, but reasonable exposure in the center. Was the exposure ideal? From a formulaic perspective they weren't, but it sometimes resulted in some rather dramatic images as you can see in the last row. The composition? Some unfortunate framing and the position of the dragon worked against me in some images, but the effect deserves an encore appearance in some future assignment. Remember that none of these images made the final cut, but I am intrigued by the results of my unorthodox lighting. 

And The Winner Is: This is the shot I submitted for publication.  It is better aligned with the expectations of the editor from a local newspaper. It gives a feeling for what happened at the event, has a distinct center of interest, thanks to the one yellow dragon standing tall, and includes lots of local residents who might actually identify themselves when the photo is published.  The nice fluffy clouds add to a more festive feel to the photo, which is true to the intent of the celebration.

願你活在有趣的時代*

 * May you live in interesting times. Courtesy Google Translation

Mill Valley

Coyote Creek from behind the closed Dipsea Cafe.

I had a free Thursday and decided to take an old camera out for a field trip. I decided to go "old school" and use my X-Pro 1 along with an 18mm F 2.0 Fujinon lens, one of the company's Holy Trinity of lenses that premiered with the camera. My choice resulted from my discovering that the camera had been in storage for a long time and that the battery had completely died. After installing a fresh battery and resetting all of the defaults, I decided to get reacquainted with the beast and take it for an outing.  It turned out to be a lesson in appreciating how far the technology has come since the X-Pro1's introduction in 2012. For instance the lack of eyepiece diopter adjustment made it difficult to compose with anything more than a suggestion of how much detail I could achieve when focusing. I found myself making the exposure (I was shooting aperture priority) and viewing it on the LCD. I believe this is due to transitioning of my progressive bifocals blurring the viewfinder. Also, the camera is very slow when compared to more recent iterations of the X-Pro family.

To compensate for the inability to adjust the diopter of the eyepiece, I began checking the LCD display after each shot. This gave me an opportunity to examine the entire image by looking at the image, rather than viewing it through the camera itself. I was forced to evaluate the composition in its entirety, rather than centering my attention on the center of the image. I found myself re-composing and retaking my images in the way I did before going to the mirrorless format. I found that this system of shoot-and-peek made me evaluate the composition more critically, and it helped me catch several missteps in framing that I immediately corrected.

Intersection of the Shoreline Highway and Almonte Blvd. 

This collection of businesses, two crow-flight miles southeast of Mill Valley's main drag, are both eclectic and colorful.  Again, Marin county shows off the creativity of its residents in a variety of ways, from strategically placed organic sculptures to bold paint schemes sprinkled  throughout the city.

Fence Festooned, Native Plant Nursery, Mill Valley

The surfer's booties, along with an errant cowboy hat, were found on the spires of this wrought iron fence. One can always speculate on who decided this would make for an interesting contrast of ideas, something of a surf-and-turf of clothing. 

This excursion at the fringe of Mill Valley provided some new subjects to photograph, and in this particular locale, an opportunity to mourn the loss of the Dipsea Cafe, the only local restaurant I knew that served rainbow trout on the weekend brunch menu. Such a loss.

The Opteka Lens, Again

I had some time to kill before I was to meet a friend in Richmond, so I thought I'd take a 30-minute detour into Sausalito and spend the time looking for something to photograph with my 15mm F 4.0 Opteka wide angle macro lens, a lens I have barely touched in over three years. As I mentioned in the Morning Photo posting, it's a lens looking for a reason to exist. Yes, it can photograph at a 1:1 reproduction ratio and render images with world-width backgrounds. But the novelty wore off quickly when the images were a little soft with color-fringed edges. It turned out that I could not find a subject that would showcase the close-focusing capabilities and the wide angle of acceptance of the lens. Everything that caught my eye was pretty much two dimensional or too large to take advantage of  the macro focusing capabilities. The canisters in this photo were about 12" in diameter, and were oddly rendered due to the short shooting distance. I attempted to correct the barrel distortion that curved the foreground, and was partially successful. The Opteka never received high marks in this regard. This was Sausalito, so of course I had to stop to admire the many yachts resting in their slips. The crisp whites and the cyan skies always catch my attention. I made tis shot intending to examine it for color fringing and other difficult to correct optical defects so common in inexpensive lenses. There was definitely some color flinging and a lack of sharpness along the edges, totally expected for a lens at this price point.

One of the most memorable articles from Modern Photography was one where a Scandinavian photographer who, armed with a Hasselblad 500, a 40mm Zeiss Distagon lens, and some film, created several black and white images using a single egg as a prop. He created one image where he photographed the soles of his model’s feet, one wearing a black sock and the other bare, with the egg carefully nestled between them. If the egg was a metaphor for the origins of life, the human presence in the image made one ponder the evolution of our species from an unusual perspective. The photographs gave me something to think about, since those images have stayed in my intellectual photo album for nearly fifty years.

The objective of creating a decent image using this lens proved to be a "bridge too far". A huge expanse of unencumbered background is difficult to find so close to civilization, so I think I will swap the lens to something that is not quite so wide. And this exercise saved me the expense of buying this Pergear 14mm lens. it is tempting.

There is one thing that may me succumb to temptation and buy the lens: My Opteka is designed to work on a Nikon DSLR, and my employ an adapter to work on my mirrorless cameras. If if turns out that the Pergear is more compact than the Opteka PLUS the necessary adapter, it may be back in the running.