A Weekend in San Francisco.

I've always wanted to drive up to San Francisco. To me, it has always seemed like a road-trip route to a potentially large amount of good times and memories. Not to mention the fact that I have very few memories of San Francisco, as I've only been there twice and both for a very short period of time, but those memories are fond and positive. Thus I jumped at the chance to drive a few of my friends and myself up the 5 for our friend Laura Jen's 23rd birthday.

This being a photo blog of sorts, I won't spend too much time on what I did there and more time on a few choice shots I worked on up there. I will say that I had a blast in San Francisco and absolutely love the city. I love that it's urban and packed, but not too packed like New York. Everything is less spread out; you can walk to the market, or to a breakfast diner. Downtown is more.... downtown-y, unlike the slum ghettos of Downtown LA. When you think of "Downtown," SF matches that ideal more than LA does. And everything just seems more quaint. However, I probably can't get over how COLD it is in SF... I miss my SD warm weathers thank you very much! I didn't really get very many shots I liked during my time there; still have lots to learn!


This is probably my favorite shot from the whole weekend, and I took it an hour out of Los Angeles. At the time I thought this shot was boring but some post processing gave this shot some oil-painting-esque quality, and some serious sharpness and detail too.

I spent a lot of the time in San Francisco dodging rain (Friday and Saturday) and driving people around (Sunday and Monday) to really get good shots off but I still had fun. Clubbing at Boss, late night card games, hanging out in some small old town called Daly City, playing with cute dogs, etc. We had an intense pillow fight the first night that involved snakes, shoes and bruises...


We also walked around the city a little, around Union Square, Chinatown, and Pier 39, where we saw some seriously fat seals:

That bird is probably thinking, "What a lazy ass."

I was excited to get to the Golden Gate Bridge to try out some HDR. Unfortunately every HDR shot I tried at the Golden Gate turned out pretty ugly. You can judge for yourself:



I'm not a huge fan of either of these pictures, but I guess it's because neither of them really needed any HDR processing in the first place, maybe some simple dodging and burning. Maybe I will try to post-process these pictures again not using HDR in the future, just to see what the difference is. I really hate that "ghosting" effect that HDR causes around structures, especially in the first picture around the bridge and the cables. Muy ugly.

I did get a chance to use a new camera gadget I recently purchased: the Nikon ML-L3 remote. I was going to use this remote for setting off the camera while holding several off-camera flashes for multiple different exposures, but a prelim trial is quickly showing that overlapping too many exposures causes way too much noise (time to invest in more flashes). The remote IS still good, however, for awesome group jumping shots, which are never in abundance when hanging out with my friends from Taiwan:


Go useful technology!

Until next time, zai jian!

-Justin.