San Francisco, 2001 (and part of 2002)
Photos by Kurt Easterwood
[Having moved away from San Francisco in mid-March, 2002, this "project" such as it was is effectively finished. -- March 26, 2002] |
To whomever stumbles onto this page.... his is an ongoing project -- well, project is a bit too strong a word -- that attempts to be a personal document of my city of residence, San Francisco, circa the summer of 2001. A photo diary if you will. There are a few reasons I'm doing this: First of all, having just returned from 3 1/2 months spent in Japan and parts of Southeast Asia, I'm finding San Francisco to be terribly unexciting. Going out with my camera is a way to combat the malaise I'm feeling, and presents me with a new challenge -- how to take interesting photos when I'm most definitely not inspired to do so. Secondly, going out and taking photos allows me to get more used to my new digital camera, the Olympus C-3030Z, which I have only used sparingly and which still seems to me more a toy than a bona fide camera. (And a toy with menus and printed manual that are entirely in Japanese, I might add!) And lastly, there is a chance that I may not be long for this City -- in the current economic (and employment) climate, it seems like everyday someone else I know has decided to move elsewhere -- and I'm starting to realize that in 13 years of living here, I have relatively little documentation of it. ~ ~ ~ For the technically inclined or interested, I'm taking these photos on the C-3030Z's HQ setting which gives me .jpg files of 2048 x 1536 resolution (around 600K each when uploaded to my computer). I make some relatively minor adjustments in Photoshop, namely some Levels adjustment and employing the Unsharp Mask filter, as well as occassional cropping (I still haven't gotten used to the discrepancy between what the Olympus shows in the viewfinder and what actually is captured on the memory card). Lastly, I bring the revised files into Fireworks to resize the images (600 pixels wide for horizontal photos) and to optimize the jpeg compression to get the file size as small as I can accept without sacrificing too much quality (most are between 40 and 50K -- I'm still on 56K dialup myself, btw). I also run a batch process in Fireworks to create the thumbnails. (Note: for other pictures taken with the Olympus C-3030Z, please see my Japan photos from earlier this year). ~ ~ ~ The pictures aren't ordered or grouped in any particular way other than somewhat chronological, and consequently it really doesn't matter where you start. Just click onto one or more of the pages linked below, and if you see a thumbnail that looks of interest, click on it. You can also progress through the photos sequentially if that is your desire. |
| Kurt Easterwood July 2001 |
Photos Most recently uploaded photos begin on page thirteen.
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