eBokeh.com

Live View: Marin Headlands

Sun, 09 May 2010 17:13 -0800

We took a drive up north of San Francisco this morning to walk around in the woods a little bit. On the way home we stopped by the Marin Headlands and ended up walking out to the Golden Gate Bridge lookout point.

Brunos, 20th and Mission

Wed, 05 May 2010 20:41 -0800

I took a walk home today after work down Market St. and then from the 16th St Bart station to dinner and then home. I'm still trying to get used to using an SLR again, it's not easy. The good thing is though that this picture is only about 3 hours old, that guy's probably still at the bar hanging out.

Brunos in the Mission is right near one of the new Banksy Street Art (BSA) sightings that have been popping up around the city this last week or so.

Transamerica Pyramid, San Francisco

Mon, 03 May 2010 18:33 -0800

Apparently that's what it's called, the, "Transamerica Pyramid." Who knew? I've walked by it 1000 times and always thought it was simply a, "building," but no!

I just got a digital camera last week, the first digital SLR camera i've ever owned. Come to think of it i haven't used a 35mm style SLR camera in a long time, it feels foreign to me now. I took it around with me over the weekend to get used to using it and i'm sold. I hope to be out of the business of forcing film down my throat all the time so i can use it when i feel like it.

Anyway, there's a lot going on here, while getting used to my new light box i'm also trying to figure out what the theme of my SoFoBoMo project is going to be this year, i've got a few different ideas (and fortunately several more weeks to make the decision). I'm trying to keep it local (to the Bay Area, but preferably San Francisco). That's it for now!

Venice Beach, CA

Mon, 19 Apr 2010 18:53 -0800

I took this picture probably 3 years ago, it's been sitting in my "2Post" folder since just a couple of weeks after that. This was taken one cloudy afternoon after checking into a hotel on the beach for the night while on my way to Joshua Tree.

I've posted a few images lately in color - digital color that is. I've been trying out a few different digital camera options, not as a replacement but more as a supplement to shooting film. Finding the time to develop, scan and edit film has become difficult (it's also starting to get annoyingly expensive). Hopefully I'll make a decision on this pretty soon (i've got a couple more options to try out yet). I want to do the SoFoBoMo in digital this year, maybe with a little large format on the side.

Half Dome Near Sunset

Thu, 15 Apr 2010 21:23 -0800

This was a post long-day, pre Ahwahnee-cocktail picture taken from the tunnel-view parking lot with a long lens.

When the sun starts to set the winds pick up pretty quickly, it's like where we live in San Francisco when at the end of the day if you're trying to do some work outside (formerly bike adjustment) on the deck you get hit by 35+mph gusts of wind.

It started to get pretty cold out there and the slightest bit of wind knocks that lens around as if the whole mess was balanced on your pinky finger. The good thing about it is i didn't have to wait long for the clouds to surround the peak of Half Dome.

While I was standing out there in the cold I started talking to a couple of guys who were doing similar things as i was (standing around in the cold). I ran into one of them later on that night in the lobby of the lodge and we showed each other what we'd been working on and talked for a while. He (Jason) had some time off between projects (he's a filmmaker in Texas) and was spending a month in the valley camping, hiking and shooting pictures. He'd used the intervalometer feature on his camera to make pictures every 10 seconds for 2 hours - he stood out there for that long - and then put them together on his computer to make a 1080p time-lapse movie of the sunset from Tunnel View, it was definitely beautiful. I showed him my picture of a rock in the river.

PS, Tom Stienstra is back at the helm again!

Stream - Bridal Veil Falls Runoff

Fri, 09 Apr 2010 18:07 -0800

Here's another image taken at the runoff of Bridal Veil Falls. I've spent bunch of time over the past few years wandering around that area of the runoff and making pictures. It's not too far off the beaten trail but there's never anyone down there so you have the entire place to yourself.
The runoff forms a different set of streams each year so it's new every time i'm there.

Bridal Veil in years past:

- Winter a few years back.

- Spring a year before that.

I tried to find this same picture this year but the runoff was different enough that it didn't work as well as i wanted. Both of the linked images were taken with a 6x7 camera using TMax film that I processed in our kitchen, the above image is taken with a 6x6 camera using a ~6x4.5 digital back.

My laptop crapped out today, the kitchen continues to work just fine.

The new site is just about done, I'm just trying to correct a couple of pretty specific problems. I hope to get to them all this weekend. Let me know if you see anything else that's problematic.

Also, if you use twitter definitely 'follow' eBokeh for all the latest updates.

Redwood Trees - Yosemite Valley

Tue, 06 Apr 2010 18:12 -0800

I'm still working through a few layout issues here on the site, hopefully I'll have them figured out soon.

Here's another image of the Redwoods in Yosemite valley during a morning walk. If you've never walked around down there it's pretty incredible. You should try it sometime, the base of needles on the ground is at least a foot thick, sometimes more. It's like walking around on a giant mattress.

Taking a Rest On The Way Down From the Vernal Trail

Sat, 03 Apr 2010 19:47 -0800

This is a fitting image, it's called "Taking a Rest" which is what i'm going to do now after twiddling around with my site for the last few hours. HTML and CSS are things I like to re-learn every few years. I don't necessarily like them, i don't necessarily hate them (although at this point i'm leaning towards the latter) I just never really use them.

I re-did a bunch of my site (there are more changes to come) to get the image size a little bigger and add a little color to it. It now looks a little more like 2008/2009 than it does 2004. It's mostly looked the same since then.

Something I'm not quite sure about is all of the old pictures. I re-sized them from their original 640 x 640 size to 800 x 800 and they look pretty bad, i think i'm going to put them all back to their original sizes and just roll with the new size starting now. I uploaded new originals of the last few sized appropriately and i'm digging it. Let me know if you see any other stuff that's out of whack and i'll fix it.

There'll be some more changes coming in the next few days. As you were.

Upper Yosemite Falls

Wed, 31 Mar 2010 19:44 -0800

Here's a detail shot of part of Upper Yosemite Falls. I spent the better part of an hour that morning scouring El Capitan for climbers (scouring = panning around every nook of the mountain through the waist level finder with a 350mm lens attached, i couldn't see straight for a little while afterwards). Alas, i think it was too early for them to be up on the rock face.

note: i think i'm going to change my site around just a little so the pictures can be a little larger. It's 2010, no one's running 800x600 resolutions anymore right? Everyone's at least 1024x786? I gave my last CRT monitor away more than 4 years ago so it's got to be okay right? ;)

Runoff from Vernal Falls

Sun, 28 Mar 2010 10:05 -0800

One last post from the valley, i'm sitting in the lobby of Yosemite Lodge and we're about to hit the road. We got up early this morning and spent a couple of hours walking around the valley before and during sunrise then went over to The Ahwahnee for breakfast.

This picture is from yesterday, we hiked up to near the base of Vernal Falls. I was breaking in some new boots and had my heels all ripped to shreds by the time we got too far anyway. We broke off the trail and I found a spot near the river to shoot some pictures. The deluge of snow earlier in the year really has the waterfalls going at full tilt this spring.

I've got to hit the road, here's a link to the full-res image. I haven't done anything to it except for adjust the levels a little bit.