Thursday Doors 2017

While I didn’t quite squeak out a full year of doors, I was still lucky enough to be introduced to Norm’s Thursday Doors challenge by my magnificent friend (and Italy compadre) Manja. Many of the doors, not surprisingly, were ones I strolled by, entered, or just plain adored whilst in my Italy travels this past summer. It’s a challenge to keep my post brief, so I’ll have to dig not so deep to try to pick my ultimate favs.

Closer to home – well, kind of! Seems these doors actually span coast to coast 🙂

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Shooting with what you have: Expressions of the 35mm lens

Art to me is expression, and that specific artistic expression – as well as interpretation – has allowed me to be creative on both the front (camera) and back ends (photoshop, etc) of every picture I take. I don’t take any of this too seriously, of course – simply because I can’t imagine enjoying it as much as I do if I lamented the shot, or if I’ve post-edited something in a shoddy way.

Before my California trip (where these shots were taken), I picked up a 35mm lens for my Nikon DSLR – a first “prime” single-focus lens in the mix of my growing list of lenses. I’d read it’s a great choice for street photography and an overall good entrance to the class of wide-angle lenses. Granted, as for street photography, it can mean getting rather close and intimate with any people you may want to be the focal point. That I didn’t do so much this go round, but instead again decided to just get a sense for the limitation it forces upon the photographer – me, who is used to adjusting my usual all in one zoom lens to suite the subject in a jiffy. 35mm too can lend to some of the best color renditions in photography. Perhaps power of suggestion, but I was in fact pleased with more than a few of the shots that were color inspiring to begin with.

None are edited, only the file size reduced for web presentation. Some are “meh” to  me, but the exercise here was shooting as though I had film in my camera, fixed focal length, with no chance of edits before or after “processing” them. I will admit, some give me the itch to really want to use even subtle post-editing features 🙂

For a bit of perspective, I posted the same images all in monochrome in a separate gallery. *Update – I now posted the monochrome first, as it gives a better sense of the color! Thanks Manja for that suggestion 🙂

I don’t typically photoblog in mosaic, but 80 photos can be tedious presented individually. You can click on the photos itself to view in larger format, as a side note. I’ve not captioned them, they are from around San Francisco, specifically the Financial District, North Beach, Telegraph Hill, Chinatown, and Embarcadero neighborhoods.

So first up: Monochrome set.

 

The same gallery, as shot in color.

A bit of a shuffle,  colorless….

 

 

Thursday Doors December 7: West Coast Doors (sung to West End Girls, if you’re a Pet Shop Boys fan)

FINALLY.

A doors posting for Thursday – what is it with busy lives??

But, on a positive spin, this week’s doors come out of a little vacation, a little respite. Actually, a lot of both, in a favorite place of mine: California. Specifically, the San Francisco Bay part of California. And while I took a boatload more pics of wildlife, birds, nature and beautiful landscapes (all that never end), those will certainly come later,  once I sort thru the mountain of digital images (thankfully, the ‘mountain’ a tiny SD card nestled in my DSLR. Heh).

Ok. Here’s to some fun funky and classy San Francisco doors!

For this week’s doors challenge.

Weekly Photo Challenge: Pedestrian

For The Daily Post’s Weekly Photo Challenge, Pedestrian

Weekly Photo Challenge: Windows

My window views from different cities, states, and islands and countries.

For The Daily Post’s Weekly Photo Challenge, Windows.

 

Thursday Doors August 3: Magnificent Doors & Doorways

For this week’s doors challenge.