Tag Archives: photography

Photographs: San Francisco, Photographs: Urban/Street

Three Men, Urban Garden

August 29, 2015 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Three men sitting on benches in a downtown San Francisco courtyard

This seemed like a rare quiet scene in this part of San Francisco, along busy Market Street, which is crowded with tourists, locals, buses and taxis at this time of year. While walking through this area with my camera I had taken a break to grab a coffee when I saw this scene right outside the window.

There are many things that strike me about the relationship between urban environments like this one and the natural world that is also a subject of my photography. Places like Market Street are so antithetical to almost the entirety of the rest of the world — they noise and bustle and crowds are truly an anomaly on this planet. In some places it is quite possible to see almost no evidence of that non-human world, except perhaps by looking straight up at the sky. Yet in places like this an image of that world, synthetic though it may be, is constructed — and it brings some quiet and stillness.

All media © Copyright G Dan Mitchell and others as indicated. Any use requires advance permission from G Dan Mitchell.

Photographs: Night, Photographs: San Francisco, Photographs: Urban/Street

Urban Reflections

August 23, 2015 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Reflected image of lights in San Francisco’s Chinatown

This photograph comes from a late-July evening spent doing night street photography in San Francisco, this time working the area between North Beach and Union Square… which of course means largely the Chinatown district. We began photography at dusk a few streets up from the touristy main drag, walking along Stockton street as the last shops closed up for the day. From here we wandered down narrow streets to the main drag, Grant, arriving there as darkness came on.

Even though it was a Friday night during the height of tourist season, there were not all that many people here, at least by the sometimes extraordinarily crowded standards of this area. Some shops were still open — catering to the out-of-town visitors — but many had closed or were closing. Nonetheless, the street held a wild variety of bright lights. At several points I forced myself to take a break from the “normal” street photography stuff and try to look at things in different ways. Here I had decided to look at light reflected in other objects, in this case a parked car.

All media © Copyright G Dan Mitchell and others as indicated. Any use requires advance permission from G Dan Mitchell.

Technique

Sharpening Basics: A Primer

August 21, 2015 G Dan Mitchell 2 Comments

(Minor updates to this article were made in February 2019.)

Sharpening is a very important step for optimizing digital photograph files. If you let your camera save images in the common .jpg format (a compressed image format that is often used on the web) the camera is applying sharpening to the image produced by the camera sensor. If you use the raw format (a high quality format that retains the original sensor data of the exposure) you will find that the photograph looks soft until you apply sharpening during the post production phase.

Sharpening optimizes the visibility of details that are already in your photograph. It is a matter of more clearly revealing what is in the photograph than a matter of creating detail where there was none. Most sharpening works by increasing the contrast between light and dark areas in the image — what we call sharpening as actually more about adjusting the relative brightness of adjacent portions of the photograph.

The image above is an example of a small section of a photograph.[1] It is a “100% magnification crop” of a tiny area from a much larger photograph made with a high megapixel DSLR camera. A “100% magnification crop” is an image displayed so that each pixel — or individual picture element — of the original photograph is displayed using a single pixel on the screen. (Things are a bit more complicated than that when using modern high-resolution monitors, though I’ll let that description stand for now.) 100% magnification crops let us look very closely at what is going on in photographas “at the pixel level.” In this case, the full original image from which these small examples were extracted would be equivalent to prints at a width of roughly 10-12 feet.

The right side of the example shows this tiny section of the photograph before sharpening. The left side shows the results of fairly typical sharpening. Continue reading Sharpening Basics: A Primer →

Photographs: San Francisco, Photographs: Urban/Street

Paris, San Francisco

August 19, 2015 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Closed Stockton Street shops, San Francisco

Today I’ll interrupt the nature/landscape photographs in order to share another photograph of a San Francisco street scene, photographed in late July when I was there for a night street photography shoot with friends. Members of the small group began assembling early enough to start with dinner — though I arrived late and had to meet up with them post-dinner on the street. We figured that if they walked south and I walked north that we might find one another along Stockton Street in the City’s Chinatown district.

This is a favorite area of mine for photography. I love the complex and often quite worn and utilitarian architecture. Shops are jam-packed close together, and at the right times of day the streets are packed with locals. Color and texture combinations can be wild, with colorful signs, painted and repainted walls, and more. On this early evening, there were no crowds. This spot is a ways up the hill from the touristy Grant, and shops were closed or closing for the day. Shops were closed or in the process of closing, so I had more unobstructed views of the buildings.

G Dan Mitchell Photography

Tag Archives: photography

Three Men, Urban Garden

Urban Reflections

Sharpening Basics: A Primer

Paris, San Francisco

Photographer and visual opportunist. Daily photos since 2005, plus articles, reviews, news, and ideas.