SF Pride Parade

First some music:

It was tough to be an amateur photographer at the LBGTQWERTYLOLXOXO gay pride parade in San Francisco. Big crowds, hot sun. But I had a good time. Almost all of the pictures I took were taken while I held my camera above my head. Sometimes the autofocus gods were generous and sometimes they weren’t.

I like when I discover someone is looking at the camera and me:

This is Sara with the red plume. I was happy she found the picture I had taken online and sent me a message.

The Dyke March was on Saturday in the mission, my neighborhood, prior to the Sunday parade.

See the whole 87 picture set. Altogether I took a little under a thousand photos! Pardon the violent metaphor, but shooting digital is like shooting with a machine gun, whereas shooting film is like a sniper rifle.

I know, that’s kind of a horrible metaphoric thing to say, but I couldn’t think of another way to put it.

Haight Street Fair

Que the music:

I had fun taking pictures at the Haight Street Fair and heavily processing them in Photoshop. I figure anyone can learn to be technically proficient, so it’s fun to try something else.

I don’t like having people pose for pictures because they end up being phony (in addition to the awkwardness of a stranger asking to take your picture), but I had to ask her for a close up. You can see the rest on Flickr.

PS. If you’re curious, here’s a comparison before/after playing with the colors, and some are more drastic than this:

Experiments in Color

First let’s cue some music.

Sometimes you don’t get lucky and your pictures aren’t that interesting. But you can make them more interesting. These are all from a Nikon D5000, except the lowrider, which was taken with an iPhone 4.