San Francisco Street Photography

Three days ago, I had some things to do in San Francisco. I thought I might as well take along my camera and use the opportunity for some photos. Here are the photos I took. :) This blog post is on the street photography I did while in San Francisco. I have color photos and black and white, and a few special process black and whites.

Full Resolution Photos and Prints: If you want to see full resolution photos or buy prints of any of the photos you see, they are up on my portfolio for viewing. To view my best day time shots of San Francisco, use this link. To view all of my photos from that photowalk, use this link.

Parts: Treasure Island Sunset | San Francisco Street Photography | The Embarcadero | 

I am going to start off with the photos of bricks I shot.

These were bricks on the side of the San Francisco General Hospital. I thought the bricks would make a nice pattern so I took a few shots.

Here is a different pattern of bricks on the wall.

Black and white processes I did on the bricks. This one is for the 2nd brick photo.

The other black and white process. This one is for the 3rd brick photo.

I then took the black and white photos and added color to them. Here are the results. This above one is of the 1st black and white photo. 

A rainbow process of the 2nd black and white photo. 

Photography Tip: The colorized black and whites were all post processed in Photoshop. I won't go into too much detail, but first you want to create several  new layers that will cover the original photograph. Then I used mostly gradients, with some layer masking on the "checkerboard" design below. You may want to turn down the opacity during the gradient making so that the original photo shows through and you can get a rough idea how it will look. After that, you want to take all those color layers and blend it in using "Soft Light". If you want to see the original PSD file for personal educational use, I'd be happy to give it to you. If you want to, just email me via the email on my "About the Photographer" page. 

I did a few more processes on that image. Here is a red and yellow one, but it did end up looking a bit orange. 

I thought the above results looked cool so I also did a blue and green one.

I also went to Chinatown for this San Francisco trip. I saw a fire hydrant, and took a photo. 

Here is a black and white process of the above image. 

These are all the photos for today, I hope you have enjoyed them. Please don't forget to share the blog post with your friends and family members! Also, if you want to get notifications when I post up more photos, "Like" us on Facebook or follow me on Twitter and Google+. These links can also be found on the top of the right sidebar.

Parts: Treasure Island Sunset | San Francisco Street Photography | The Embarcadero | 

Pleasanton Sports Park Birds and Squirrels

Last month our church had a picnic at the Pleasanton Sports Park. I was one of the photographers for them. :) (Yay! Talent finally recognized by a group of people. LOL) Anyways, I thought it would be great for me to utilize the time I was there to also take photos of the birds and squirrels there. I didn't take too much photos when I was there because:

1. I was taking photos for the church event.
2. There wasn't many birds or squirrels at the park.

So the church photos I took for them went to the church, and the other photos I took, I'm here to share with you! I hope you enjoy viewing these photos! Pleasanton Sports Park is located in Pleasanton, CA.

Full Resolution Photos and Prints: If you want to see full resolution photos or buy prints of any of the photos you see, they are up on my portfolio for viewing. To see my best Pleasanton photos of 2012, use this link. To see my best wildlife photos, use this link. To see all of my Pleasanton photos of 2012, use this link.

Quick Photography Lesson: See how the background is out of focus and has lots of circles? In photography, this is called the bokeh effect. Generally you will need some light source (don't have to be strong) to achieve this effect. To take a photo of this effect, you will have to shoot with a wide aperture (small f-stop number), and the part you want the effect to be has to be out of focus (use manual focus). On cheaper lenses, the bokeh may be a hexagon or some other shape instead of a circle. This is due to the less rounded cheaper aperture blades in cheaper lenses. Some people may even use this effect to do special effects. One of the most popular type of DIY effect is taking black construction paper and cutting a shape on it to change the bokeh. You can find out more about this by using Google and searching "diy custom bokeh". 

Black Phoebe (Sayornis nigricans)

Stupid bird didn't turn around so here is a photo of its butt. 

The black phoebe standing on a fire hydrant in the middle of the park. 

Looks like the only bird I got a photo of in the park was the black phoebe... There really wasn't much wildlife there. Maybe they are hiding from all the people. 

The only squirrel I saw in the park that day... I saw a lot more back then in Fremont Central Park. Maybe not enough people are feeding them at this park... (Please don't feed the wildlife...)

This is all the photos for today! I hope you have enjoyed viewing today's post. Please don't forget to share the blog post with your friends and family! In the next post, I will begin my Monterey photos. I know a lot of you are looking forward to those so please check back often! I generally do one post every two to three days. Again, those times may change as I said in a post of mine before, college is starting for me, so I have been pretty busy.