For the time I was on Market on Saturday, it was hard, blasting light everywhere. The smarter thing to do is to probably walk away from light like this, but I'm persnickety and kept trying anyway. Eventually got this little moment, which I liked since the bricks were kicking up enough light to act as a bit of a reflector for fill.
I went up to the city on Saturday for some photos, and wasn't super happy with the results. For most of the day, it felt like I was fighting the light (hot and hard). Got a few shots of a pro-Egypt protest by Civic Center, then came back to Union Square.
The second time I saw the Henri Cartier-Bresson exhibition at SF Moma, I noted one really important fact: Here was a man who really, really, really loved to photograph picnics. So, picnics were weirdly in the back of my head all day, and I actually came upon some people having lunch at the corner of Union Square. Very happy with the composition, though I don't so much like the default presentation on Flickr (the image works best viewed larger).
In an earlier post, I mentioned that I was going to go through my photos and produce a 'best of' set of about ten of my favorites. It took a little longer than I thought (perhaps because I uploaded 2,500 photos in 2011?), but it was a useful exercise for me.
Here's a little blurb I wrote by way of introduction on our photography@ list at work:
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"Your first 10,000 photographs are your worst."
– Henri Cartier-Bresson
I'm no HCB; I felt like my first 100,000 photos were my worst, but I can happily say that as I come up on my third anniversary of owning an SLR, I feel more things clicking.
I also have a clearer idea what I'm trying to do.
I believe that there is a universe of moments all around us. Some of these moments almost anybody can see, and they cluster in a great big majestic swath of time -- stuff like a sunset over Market Street; a steady juxtaposition of old and new; or the architecture of modernism triumphant. These can be great and awesome, but I find that these vistas are less of interest to me than an entirely different class of moment.
I believe that as we drift (some, perhaps, are dragged -- others, pushed?) through life, we are surrounded by little slivers of beauty which persist only for a moment. Blink once, and they're gone. Don't even blink, and you might actually see one.
The most miraculous thing about a camera is that it opens you up to this world of minute moments -- both in its capacity to capture such instants, and because it necessitates teaching yourself a way of seeing which is outside of your day to day experience. These moments have always been there, but it took a camera to let us see them for what they really are. The camera can allow us to capture a scene that some artist should paint, but never would without a camera to see it.
I don't always (or even generally) capture these moments, but I find that when I do, I feel like that I have discovered something. Sometimes I have to chip away a bit (maybe with the crop tool), or remove the extraneous (color), but there is the impression that what is there was somehow waiting to be found.
And that's the type of photo I like best.
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Without further ado, here's my top 12 for the year:
And, to see where I was coming from, here was my top 100:
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Many of the photos from this blog were in the top 100, but a number of shots crept in that weren't normally posted here just because I tend to emphasize street photography (which is my favorite) and portraits (my second favorite type of photography) on the blog.
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I could write a lot about these photos, but I think it's better now to just thank everyone who helped -- all my long suffering friends [and their pets] who for the last few years have let me photograph them over and over (some of whom now pause like a hunted animal at the click of the shutter), and also all the photographers on the internet who are inspiration to anyone doing my type of photography. The Bay Area is lousy with great photographers, and it's a pleasure to see a steady stream of amazing shots from my home.
And of course, my girlfriend deserves the most praise of all -- for inspiring (and putting up with) me. During the time we've been together, I've brought a tripod on our first fancy date, rushed to the edge of the water near her family's vacation home to photograph an alligator, snuck away at night to photograph downtown Las Vegas, and even fired away in the French Laundry when they bought out the foie gras.
The remaining question after conducting an exercise like this is 'What next?'.
At the beginning of last year, I made a few goals:
Take more street photographs (and get better at them)
Do a few projects
Make a place to highlight my favorite photos away from the flotsam and jetsam of Flickr
The good news is, I think I've done all these things, even the part about getting better. Looking back over just a year, I think I can see a definite improvement -- if nothing else, getting a lot better with using my primes with a wider perspective (28mm, 35mm), and stepping away from longer lenses with which I was producing consistent if not eye-opening shots.
I'm not sure where I should go next. I'm pretty happy with my weekend trips up to San Francisco to shoot on the streets, along with hitting the right sort of events (I think of them as the ones 'with character') at key times and dates. "Walking the beat" with my camera on the weekend has slowly begun to give me a set of street photos I really like -- maybe the next step is collecting some of those in a book or a showing somewhere?
Was up in the city on Sunday to take B to see the last day of the Cartier-Bresson exhibition at SF Moma. For brunch, we met our friends Ian & Tara at 2223 Market, which served me the best cinnamon-pecan bun I've had in years. ;)
It had just stopped raining outside and the clouds were breaking, so the light was going nuts through the windows -- saw these guys sitting in a sort of triangle, and shot this. Love the way the light is rimming the guy in the foreground, and the general geometry of the scene.
I'm on a roll with the airport theme lately. Shot this at the airport in San Jose de los Cabos. We disembarked onto the tarmac, and there was actually a human line of people to mark where we should walk (there was a non-zero risk of walking into machinery or propellers). I thought it was pretty cool that we had actual people sort of welcoming us (even if they weren't always so excited about it), and I liked this shot I got of one of the guys with the zig-zag of the ramp in the background.
Our trip to Cabo san Lucas also brought me face to face with my first Mexican airport. Parts of it were identical (maybe modulo a decade or two), but what I wasn't prepared for was stepping off the tarmac and into a giant room of people shouting about timeshare deals to me. I'm not talking about a few people peddling, I mean institutional support for airport spam. Imagine a whole room of people behind desks, all of whom were ostensibly offering you rides to your hotel -- in return for listening to a time share pitch. It was actually impossible to distinguish between legitimate taxi companies and time share companies (it actually wasn't even clear if there *was* such a thing as a legitimate taxi company).
The coolest guy in the giant was this security guy shoved off in a corner, way more alert than his lazy dog snoozing underfoot. Loved this shot of him, and the framing of bystanders really gave it an interesting perspective.
Our hotel in Los Cabos had a private beach, with a catch. Every few minutes, vendors would wander by the roped off area, hawking random bits of touristy junk. They were pretty adamant about selling you something -- make eye contact with them for even a second, and they immediately start calling to you with an offer. Some of them would stand in a position, others would wander by -- persistently offering their wares every few minutes. After learning to tune them out, I managed to snap this frame as they started chatting amongst themselves.
