David Dugan

Angles on a pyramid

One of the niceties of shooting where you live is having the opportunity to shoot the same subject on multiple occasions, and explore it from different locations and perspectives. One such subject in my neighborhood is one of San Francisco’s most famous landmarks, and its signature skyline element: the Transamerica Pyramid.

Erected amidst much controversy in 1972, the Pyramid’s distinctive shape is a fiendishly clever solution to three problems: 1) Transamerica wanted their building to reach higher than the nearby Bank of America building, the tallest in the city at the time; 2) being on the very fringe of where the Financial District meets North Beach and the historic Jackson Square district, there were limits in place on the amount of square footage for offices allowed on that plot of land; and 3) towering as it would over the Gold Rush buildings of Jackson Square, it needed to cast as small a shadow as possible over its neighboring historic district.

The result is an icon.

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As much as I enjoy shooting a particular subject from several locations and perspectives, I also like to experiment with many different post-production treatments, often revisiting and reprocessing a photo even months or years later. Following are a few variations on the theme, with brief explanations of the shot and the process.

This cross-processed shot was taken at Union & Montgomery Streets in North Beach, on Telegraph Hill, four blocks from my building. Montgomery Street ends briefly just over this rise, as the descent from Union to Green Street is too precipitous for cars to handle--which, in San Francisco, means it’s really, really steep.

This was shot handheld with a Canon EOS 30D and Canon EF17-40mm f/4L USM lens, and processed using a black & white luminosity mask, and some faux cross processing with a bit of vignetting.

This Polaroid transfer shot was taken at Montgomery & Washington Streets, right at the foot of the Pyramid, surrounded on each corner by the Financial District, Jackson Square, North Beach, and Chinatown.

This was shot handheld with a Canon A-1 and Canon FD50mm f/1.2L lens on Kodak E200 slide film. The processed slide was then printed to Polaroid 669 film using a Vivitar slide printer, and transferred midway through development onto watercolor rag using a dry-transfer process.

This black & white shot was taken from the roof of my building at Powell & Union Streets in North Beach. The sharp, angular components of the Pyramid make for excellent high-contrast, red-filtered black & white photos in bright sunlight.

This was shot handheld with a Canon EOS 300D and Vivitar Series 1 100-400mm f/4.5-6.7 lens, and processed using a custom red-filtered black & white conversion.

This glamour shot was also taken from the roof of my building at Powell & Union Streets in North Beach.

This was shot handheld with a Canon EOS 300D and Canon EF80-200mm f/4.5-5.6 USM lens, and processed using raised midtones and highlights, and a custom color process I call “blue inversion”.

This Polaroid transfer shot was taken at Columbus & Kearny Streets, where North Beach meets Chinatown. The foreground building, one of San Francisco’s two surviving Flatiron buildings, is known as both Columbus Tower and the Sentinel Building, but is most famous for being the home of Francis Ford Coppola’s American Zoetrope studios, with a Niebaum-Coppola winery cafe on the street.

This was shot handheld with a Canon A-1 and Canon FD50mm f/1.2L lens on Kodak E200 slide film. The processed slide was then printed to Polaroid 669 film using a Vivitar slide printer, and transferred midway through development onto watercolor rag using a dry-transfer process.

And finally, this unprocessed shot is nearly identical to the previous image, taken at Columbus & Kearny Streets in North Beach. While these two buildings appear to be near each other, there’s a difference of two blocks and thirty-five stories between them.

This was shot handheld with a Canon EOS 300D and Canon EF28mm f/1.8 USM lens in late afternoon sun, with no color processing to speak of.

A more dramatic sky

My brother recently commented on the fact that Ansel Adams was not only an artist behind the lens, but a master craftsman in the darkroom as well, working tirelessly on both skill sets to achieve his status as a legendary and pioneering photographer.

Digital post production is the 21st-century equivalent of Ansel’s darkroom chops, and there are myriad color processing techniques available to today’s photographer. Many of these techniques are rather advanced, of course, but there are many simple adjustments that can significantly improve the photos right off your digital camera, using basic Photoshop skills.

One of my favorite things to do with my photographs is to create a more interesting and dramatic sky (especially since I don’t shoot with a polarizer as often as I probably should), and there is a fairly simple technique to accomplish this.

Above is a photograph of the Pigeon Point Lighthouse, just north of Santa Cruz, California. This is the JPEG image right off my camera, cropped to a 16:9 aspect ratio (just because). It’s a decent image, but it’s a little flat, and I’d like to punch up the sky for a more dramatic and pleasing photograph. Here’s my technique:

With my image open in Photoshop CS3, I’m going to bring up my Layers palette. I want to keep all of the color data from the original image intact, so the first thing I want to do is duplicate my Background layer by dragging it onto the “Create a new layer” icon in the Layers palette or by selecting Layers > Duplicate Layer... from the menu bar. (Click on the small screen shot at right to view it at full size.)

I want to be able to make adjustments to just the blue color of the sky without affecting the rest of my image, and one easy method for doing that is to convert my new layer to grayscale using the Black and White adjustment dialog. With my new layer selected, I go to Image > Adjustment > Black & White... to bring up the Black and White adjustment dialog. I want to make sure that I have the Preview box checked so that I can see the effect that my adjustments are having to my image. In this case, I’m only interested in affecting the sky, so I’m going to move the Blue and Cyan sliders down until I get the level of darkness and contrast that I like. In this case, since the sky was pretty light in my original image, that means cranking the Blue and Cyan sliders all the way down; this will vary from image to image. Now I’ll click OK to save that adjustment to my new layer. Now my image looks like this:

Now that I have darkened and increased the contrast of the sky on my grayscale layer, I want to blend this new data with my original color image. I’ll do this by setting the Color Mode of my grayscale layer to Luminosity, using the pull-down menu at the top left of the Layers palette. This blends the light characteristics of the grayscale layer with the color data of the Background layer, resulting in a nice, darker and more dramatic sky. Notice that the coloring of the lighthouse remains unaffected, which is why this method is superior to just darkening the whole top half of the image.

(Since my grayscale image is floating on a separate layer, I have a great degree of flexibility in controlling exactly how much of the effect I want to incorporate, simply by changing the opacity of the grayscale layer, which can be changed at any stage of the process. The effect will be much more subtle at 50% opacity, for example. In this case, I'm going to keep the grayscale layer at 100% opacity for a full implementation of the darkened-sky effect.)

Now my image looks like this:

Much more dramatic, but there are several things I don’t like about this result: I don’t like the way the ocean looks so much darker now; I don’t like the artifacts at the border of land and sea along the left side of the image; and I don’t like the dark green color of the vegetation at the bottom of my image. To fix these problems, I’m going to make a gradient mask so that my dark sky effect fades out nicely as it reaches the ocean’s horizon. With my grayscale layer selected, I’m going to add a mask to that layer by clicking on the “Add layer mask” button in the Layers palette.

With the layer mask selected on my grayscale layer, I’m going to fill the mask with a simple default gradient so that the blue sky effect fades at the horizon line. With my foreground color set to White and my background color set to Black, I’m going to grab the gradient tool (by pressing the g key or selecting it from the Tools palette) and I’m going to draw a simple vertical gradient (holding the Shift key to constrain my gradient to a straight line). I want to draw a fairly short gradient line, starting from about one-third the distance between the horizon and the bottom of my image, and dragging the gradient tool straight up to about one-third the distance between the horizon and the top of my image. You can draw this gradient onto the mask as many times as you like until you get it just right. With the gradient applied to my mask now, only the top half of my image has the dark sky effect applied, and the transition from the sky to the horizon is nice and smooth, thanks to the gradient mask. This is what my final image looks like:

And the “before and after”:

Sunrise on the bay

Woke up restless this morning... probably because there was a brand new camera body sitting on my desk, so I made my way down to the waterfront and watched the sun rise. These are a few of the first pics off my new baby, a Canon 30D (I like it!).

Making the best of a bad photo

The first thing I do when I upload new photos to the Mac is to start weeding out the losers--the photos that may be technically correct, but lack any sort of life, or are just aesthetically awkward in some way. Many subpar photos can be redeemed with a simple crop or exposure adjustment, but many are just not worth archiving at all. If I can look at a photo and say to myself that there’s nothing in there that I’ll ever love, I throw it away on the spot and move on to the rest of the batch.

But every once in a while there’s a shot that--while far from good--may have some single element that suggests it could be good, or even great. The question then becomes, what can I do to fix it? What is the solution to this problem?

Take the photograph to the right, for example. I was going through an archive of older pictures, and something about this image caught my eye. There’s certainly not much to like about it. It’s dark and muddy with no interesting lighting to speak of, the color is bland, the background is boring and flat, and the angle is not very flattering to the model. It’s not sexy or fun or dramatic...just amateurish and kind of cheesy.

This is exactly the kind of bad photo I would have happily thrown away, except that I kind of liked the look on the model’s face. There was a very retro-pinup feel about it, and I thought it would be fun to explore that. I didn’t have a vision in mind for exactly how I wanted the photo to turn out, but by solving each little problem one step at a time as they were presented to me, the final image revealed itself a little more with each stage in the process. Eventually, I ended up with an unexpected image that I was very pleased with. (By the way, this is not intended to be a step-by-step tutorial, so I won’t be going into great detail on this sequence of manipulations.)

My first step [thumbnail No. 1] was to crop the image in order to focus attention on my subject (her face) and remove all of the distracting elements. In this case, I decided to go with a square aspect ratio.

Normally, I would explore a few different color treatments, but I wanted to play up this retro-pinup look, so I converted the image to black & white [thumbnail No. 2]. I have always used several different methods to convert images from RGB to grayscale in Photoshop, but as of version CS3, I find myself using Photoshop’s new “Black & White” adjustment almost exclusively. For this photo, I simply applied the “Green Filter” setting, which is a great filter to use for skin tones.

At this point, the photo was still very muddy looking, with nearly all of the color data in the shadows, so I increased the contrast of the image by using “Curves” to dramatically raise the midtones and highlights [thumbnail No. 3]. I followed this up with a quick adjustment in “Levels” to bring the shadow areas back towards black without affecting my new midtones and highlights.

This was certainly a better image at this point, but it wasn’t quite where I wanted it to be yet. It was a pretty good photo now, but it struck me as sort of a backstage candid, and I had originally envisioned a more dramatic sort of studio shot. What it needed was more interesting lighting.

Fortunately, this particular pose provided me with a very simple solution. Since the whole right side of her body consisted of darker shadow areas (her hair and blouse), it would be very easy for me to blend a dark gradient onto the image without having to do any fancy masking on areas with high contrast (areas with black and white butting up against each other). The darkness of the gradient would blend with the dark areas of her hair and blouse very seamlessly.

I created a new layer, filled it with a simple black & white gradient, and set the gradient to “Multiply” mode at 80% opacity [thumbnail No. 4]. Then I added a mask to that layer and masked out the gradient in the areas over her skin, basically “painting” her back in. As a final touch, I created one more layer, added another simple black & white gradient, this time at 50% opacity in “Screen” mode, which added the effect of a brighter light coming in from the right side of the image. Et voila...

There’s no replacement for taking the best photo you can take in the camera, but sometimes a little creative photo manipulation can make up for a lot of mistakes in the field. And every once in a while, you might even stumble upon something fresh and unexpected. Perhaps it’s the graphic designer in me, but as much as I love going out and taking photographs, I love working on them after the fact just as much, or maybe even more.

1908 Emporium Dome

The classical facade of the Parrott Building has been a central fixture on Market Street since 1896. Designed by celebrated San Francisco architect Albert Pissis, the grand edifice housed both the Emporium department store and the California Supreme Court before being completely gutted in the fires following the Great Earthquake of 1906.

Upon reopening in 1908, the entire building had been rebuilt, including the Emporium's signature feature: a 102-foot wide glass and steel dome under which live orchestras would entertain shoppers and diners in Parisian style. The beautiful dome was blacked out during World War II and was neglected thereafter, until the Emporium eventually closed its doors in 1996.

Today, the classical Parrott Building has been given new life as the site of the Westfield San Francisco Centre, anchored by Bloomingdale's' west coast flagship, and both the 1908 Emporium facade and the grand dome have been meticulously and beautifully restored.

The Emporium Dome stands today, along with City Hall and the Palace of Fine Arts, as one of San Francisco's great Beaux-Arts treasures, and is well worth a visit.

See more of my Emporium Dome photos here.