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King of Ramen

A friend of mine scored two tickets for a pop-up at the Ramen Shop by Osamu Tomita, King of Ramen in Japan. They say that the Rich Tonkotsu Gyokai Tsukemen (Dipping style of Ramen, Pork and fish base rich soup) by Osamu Tomita is to die for! With all the ingredients flown in fresh from Japan, it was everything they said. I caught the chef in action, busy creating our meal, a proverbial arm’s touch away. My tiny Konica BigMini did its best to capture the intense focus. It is not as beautiful a point-and-shoot film camera like the Contax T3, but I love how it feels in my hand. The film was the Fuji Superia 400 — not the best, but delivers in a pinch.

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On Film: San Francsico LongExposures

As I wrote earlier in the year, my goal for 2018 is that I want to learn how to express myself better on film. Long exposures are a form of expression for me, and it makes perfect sense that I would try and replicate some of my long exposure experiments on film. I want to get good enough and feel confident in what I am doing. (more…)

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[Photos from a] San Francisco Weekend

One of the targets I have set for myself is that I will walk a minimum of additional 8,000 steps every day for rest of the year. Walking out of the house with a camera is a great motivator and before I know it, I have surpassed my daily goals in a jiffy.

Yesterday, I decided it was time to play around with a film. I picked up my medium format Mamiya 6 camera and off I went to make some long exposures. The manual settings, the manual calculation of the time it would take to properly expose a photo and the idea that you for to wind-the-film forward were quite therapeutic compared to the rather automated world of digital. I did end up cheating a little. (more…)

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Meta.Bijan

A coffee with Chris Michel and Bijan Sabet turned into a full-blown photo session. I thought this photo represented Bijan the best — with his Leica, captured on Chris’ Leica in my everyman’s Leica, the iPhoneX.

Photo 05/30: iPhoneX  Portrait mode, f2.4, 1/120th of a second.

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Jingle Bells

It was quite hard to find a photo today as I was busy with partner meetings most of the day, and then had a lot of emails to deal with upon my return from Palo Alto. Our building was putting up a Christmas tree, and I took this photo as it went up. A good reminder that holiday season is finally here!

Photo 04/30: iPhoneX  Portrait mode, f2.4, 1/30th of a second.

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Towers in the Mist

TowerintheMist

Fog is my weakness, and every time there is low fog, I am out and about with my camera. I like the muted sounds, the shroud of grey and the silence that comes with fog. I loved this image of how SalesForce tower is emerging out of the mist as a defining feature of San Francisco’s landscape and the Pyramid building is fading into the background. Both these buildings have been polarising in their impact on San Francisco’s skyline.

San Francisco, November 25, 2016. 

Photo 02/30: Leica SL with Canon 50mm lens f8, 1/500th of a second, ISO 100.

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Tuscany from the lens of iPhone 8+

I was in Tuscany, Italy recently and had a chance to put the new iPhone 8+ through the paces. While I made a lot of photos with my Leica SL, I wanted to take a moment and share some of the fantastic photos that came out of the iPhone. These photos are a joy — straight JPEGs out of the phone, with my special, presets applied to give them a more uniform feel. The iPhone8+ is a spectacular camera, especially under good light — much less noisy compared to its predecessors. These are handheld shots and you can see the improvement from the early iPhone models in optical stabilization is incredible.

I don’t see any reason why anyone needs a point and shoot, or even a medium priced camera. Most of us don’t print photos. We share and consume photos on digital screens. And if these are good enough to be a desktop background, they are good enough for sharing. For me, smartphone photography is the future. One needs to learn how to make it professional grade by applying skills and not thinking about the camera.

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