Shiba Royalty

The Legion of Honor seemed like a fitting place to take Suki’s next image for my 52 week project. I attempted to post one of the images I made from this shoot to Flickr, but ran into a strange problem. Nearly an hour after uploading the photo, the image wouldn’t appear in my contacts’ home pages. I discovered this after noticing the unusually low amount of traffic on the photo after uploading it. After re-uploading the image a few times with no success, I gave up for the night. Maybe the issue will be resolved later and I can proceed as normal. Until then I’m holding off on uploading anything to Flickr.

You wouldn’t know it from this photo, but there were actually a lot of people standing around us during this shoot. Suki drew the attention of a lot of people, who crowded around and watched me photograph her. She’s quite the popular dog!

Camera Specs: Nikon D300s + Tokina 50-135mm f/2.8 + SB-900 cam left, SB-800 on camera

Josh Visits SF!

Nikon D300s + Tamron 17-50mm f/2.8 VC + Hand Held SB-900 // 17mm f/14 ISO200 1/800 Second

I enjoyed a four day weekend for once this week, and got to spend time with my cousin, who flew in with friends from New York. We had a great time touring them around the city and taking lots of pictures, many of which are still sitting in my computer waiting to be processed! Now that I’m back at work I have so little time. The above picture is Josh on top of Twin Peaks, sporting a D90 and the original Tamron 17-50 that I sold him. It was great to get together and talk cameras, as I don’t have any other close buddies who are into photography!

Nikon D300s + Tokina 50-150mm f/2.8 at 50mm f/4  ISO200 1/250 second

Here’s Josh with his two buddies from NY (left) as well as other family members (right), enjoying a break from the frigid weather on the east coast. What’s up with the lollipops? They’re included with every sandwich you order from Ike’s Place, one of my favorite sandwich shops in SF. I have lots more images to upload, but it’ll have to wait. Josh is still in town!

I’ve added these images to my Portfolio. Check it out!

ニッコリ笑う犬

Ok Shiba fans, are you ready for one of the cutest Shiba videos ever? Shibas tend to display pretty happy-looking faces, but the Shiba  in this video takes it a step further. Her name is ちいちゃん (Chii). Isn’t she sweet?

I wonder if I could get Suki to do this…

A Red, Furry Blur

Yeah, She’s Fast – 4/52, originally uploaded by kaoni701.

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That’s what Suki would have looked like in this image if I didn’t use a fast enough shutter speed. She rarely runs as fast as she can, but one of the few occasions she’ll go full throttle (besides chasing my cousin’s poor rabbit in the backyard), is at the dog park. Suki is FAST. When she really goes flat out, her strides become huge, and all four paws come way off the ground and she surges forward.

She’ll often leap over other dogs much larger than her too, just for the fun of it. It’s quite a sight to see, and really makes me want to find the time to get her into agility training. Every time I see a dog doing agility, I think to myself “boy, Suki would trash that course and not even break a sweat!”.

www.flickr.com/explore/interesting

I was happy to see this photo reach the 2nd page of Flickr’s explore page today. It was also featured on Flickr’s interestingness page!

Camera Specs: Nikon D300s + Tokina 50-135mm f/2.8 at 135mm f/2.8, ISO320 1/1000 Second

Rain in San Francisco

Nikon D300s + Nikkor 35mm f/1.8

We’ve seen a ton of rainfall over the last week in San Francisco. While in some ways, rain can be a photographic bummer, it does open lots of other opportunities to make nice images. At night, the wet ground reflects light and adds drama to your photography, as shown above. Suki doesn’t like getting wet, but she loves walking enough to make the compromise.

Rain or shine, the camera stays with me!

Rainy days usually mean nice, even lighting from the cloud cover, which helps you capture really saturated color (this is not my car!).

Between the several storms that hit the city recently, beautiful clouds not typical of our area appeared. Of course, I was at work every time these sorts of formations showed up (sigh). I took this shot during lunch before heading back to the office. There were no other angles other than through a cyclone fence.

Nikon D300s + Tokina 50-135mm f/2.8

After a storm passes, the air in the city is amazingly clear and clean, allowing for great city scape photography. This image has a cooler white balance applied to it than the original that I posted to Flickr.

Camera Bag for Iphone

Filter: Magazine

As much as I love Hipstamatic for Iphone, it does cripple my ability to change the iPhone camera’s focus and metering point, and it also takes a while to get from booting up the app to actually shooting.

To give me a little more control and speed when I want it, I downloaded  Camera Bag for $1.99. It features several quirky filters that you can apply to any picture you’ve already taken (unlike Hipstamatic, which mimics the film toy camera experience).

Filter: Lolo

Filter: Instant

Filter: Cinema

Filter: Cinema

Filter: 1979

Filter: Fisheye

Filter: Magazine

Filter: Helga

My iPhone now has many photo editing abilities, including panoramic stitching and HDR. Which makes me wonder, why can’t my expensive D300s do stuff like this!? Wouldn’t it be cool if Nikon opened up their digital cameras to software developers? One can dream can’t he?

A New Blog and Portfolio

So I thought I’d try something new and start another blog. I noticed lately that I have a ton of Hipstamatic images sitting in my Iphone collecting virtual dust, so I created a blog dedicated to Hipstamatic. Check it out!

http://jonathanhipstamatic.wordpress.com/

I also decided to get a portfolio started today. I was introduced to a cool site called carbonmade that offers a very simple and slick portfolio experience. You can check out this work-in-progress here:

http://jonathanfleming.carbonmade.com/

Suki’s Night Walks

I take Suki on shorter walks during lunch, but we usually go for longer strolls at night. This particular walk was a little more difficult for me because I was hauling some camera gear on my shoulder while out on the town, but I wanted to get a nice night shot of Suki for my 52 week Flickr project. The image above didn’t quite make the cut as my selection for week 3 of the project.  I really like this shot of her, but the fact that it’s ever-so-slightly front-focused bothers me.

Someone on Flickr asked me if I took my latest shot of her using available city light. I was glad he asked, because that’s exactly how I wanted it to look! At this spot, there wasn’t nearly enough ambient to get this kind of image, so I used a couple of carefully placed, gelled speedlights to help me out.

At times I hear photographers complain that they don’t like the look of flash and and so they shy away from using it. I say they’re missing out! Perhaps when they’re referring to “the look of flash,” they mean the harsh, bare, unflattering light that comes straight from camera axis. But “artificial” light can be modified: softened, directed, colored, and controlled to achieve a desired look. Using it creatively opens up endless photographic opportunities that simply wouldn’t be possible by relying solely on the sun or the crummy light radiating from a street lamp.

So get to know your flash! It can take your photography to the next level.

San Francisco Light Rail

Nikon D300s + Tokina 50-135mm f/2.8 at 50mm f/2.8 ISO250 1/60 second

I don’t do very much black and white, but a shot of a 1938 San Francisco light rail train is just begging to be converted to grayscale, suffer from some clipped blacks and highlights, and have some vignetting applied to it. I’m fascinated by these old trains, and hope I can find time to chase them around the city and photograph them one of these days.

City Dog

Nikon D300s + Tokina 11-16mm f/2.8, Post in Lightroom 3 Beta and Photoshop CS4

For my 52 week photographic project about Suki, I want to include images that tell a story about her life. I’m hoping viewers will see her personality and get a sense of the environments she encounters from day-to-day. This premise spawned the idea for my latest image on Flickr in this series. I’ve lived in big cities all my life, and I wanted to show that the city is Suki’s domain as well.

The final image for the project was harder to capture than it likely looks, probably harder for my light stand (wife) than me, as she needed to instruct Suki on what to do, light her correctly, and keep the flash unit from going into standby all at the same time. Definitely not as easy as working with a human subject!

You don’t have to look far to find urban artwork in the city. This entire building was covered in it, and I would have loved to use other portions of the art as well, but we couldn’t spend too much time on the shoot. Suki might have lost her patience! Nevertheless, the art made an awesome background to convey Suki’s urban life. We got a lot of smiles from passerby, and a few of them found their way into my outtakes.

Nikon D300s + Tokina 11-16mm f/2.8 at 11mm f/5.6 ISO200 1/125 Second

The shot above was initially a test image to see what my flashes were up to and get a good starting point for the shoot. I ended up liking it….in a goofy kind of way. The the shot at the top of this post is the first image I’ve heavily post-processed in a while. I was going for that cross-processed look, and I really like how it turned out.

The pose in the image I posted to the project was all Suki’s doing. I was really close to her with my Tokina 11-16, and she suddenly did a “down” on all fours (like the first image in this post). I fired away. Looking at the LCD, I grinned from ear to ear:

“We got it!”

Suki got an extra helping of treats.

Please see the final image on flickr: Click Here