someone decorated my front gate - thanks!

I came home the other day and noticed a new addition to our front gate. Since I live on Haight Street in San Francisco, street art is abundant and pretty much anything goes. Many storefronts actually pay artists to decorate their buildings. I thought this one was pretty tasteful and had an original style to it so I decided to document it. It will probably get painted over in the next month or so and once again become a clean canvas until a new artist arrives.

superchiaro.com

I have purchased the domain name superchiaro.com for this blog. So now, instead of navigating to www.digitalblindspot.com/blog/ you can also just go to www.superchiaro.com and it will take you right here! Some minor site adjustments will be happening over the next few days. The old domain name will still work too.

Genentech's Giants Luxury Box

Last week, Danielle was nice enough to extend an invitation to me for a Giants game in the Genentech luxury suites at AT&T Park. Although they lost, it was still a blast (thanks again!). I was able to snap off 3 images of our viewpoint and use photoshop to stitch them together for an interesting panoramic as the fog began to roll into the park that evening.

Within the Walls

Here's another one from Alcatraz. I'm still not sure how I feel about this one but its looking way better than the original. The original was a pretty feeble attempt at shooting out of a very small window from within the main cell block of the prison. These openings were small and if you were in your cell you wouldn't be able to see out. But if you were out of your cell or you were a guard, you could go up to one of these tiny windows and look out and see freedom and city in the distance. One of the most memorable things on the Alcatraz audio tour was the former inmates talking about how on new years eve they could actually hear the celebrations going on in San Francisco from out in the middle of the bay. I thought that was fascinating so I tried to capture something of a feeling from inside this prison longing to get out.

I made a bunch of adjustments to this image.. some of which I'm still not sure about. Most obvious is the crop and the heavy sloppy border put around the image. I did that to give it an extra gritty and sort of raw feel to it. Another adjustment I made was to the temperature of the colors in this image. I shifted them towards yellow just to personal taste. I wanted the outside of these walls to feel sunny and bright as contrasted with the grime on the window and the darkness surrounding it.

From Alcatraz 2008

Recently did a trip out to Alcatraz Island here in San Francisco. I had not been to "the rock" since I was probably about 10 years old, so it was fun to see it again for the first time. It was a really nice day in San Francisco.
This image is just something I was messing with in photoshop. I will try to post something else from Alcatraz soon.
This image is just a crop of another image with a black and white adjustment layer in photoshop. Then I just masked off the foreground vs. background for the contrast of color versus black and white. Added some saturation to the color and a small vignette around the edges. Oh, and I added a rather large border.