Tower Vertebrae

Taken in San Francisco here:


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This one was taken during an informal photowalk during the Google Plus Photography Conference with Mark Esguerra, a great photographer and very nice person. You can see his blog here, his portfolio here and his Google+ profile here. We had just shot the Bay Bridge and were walking back to the conference when I looked up and fired off a couple of shots of this building. I was playing around with a demo of Nik Software’s Viveza 2 (watch the video; the good stuff starts at 1:58) plug-in for Photoshop, Lightroom and Aperture. My demo time ran out so I opened the above image in Snapseed and started to tweak. I love the ability to save TIF files from Snapseed, but for non-grungy, more straightforward edits, I’m looking hard at Viveza.

Adobe could do something similar with adjustment brushes in Lightroom if they wanted to. Snapseed is essentially Viveza with less daunting controls, grunge notwithstanding.

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The Gray Lady in Green

This was taken in December, 2008, during our one-day power trip to San Francisco.

In 1998, I did a kind of interview/portfolio share at what was then CKS. I was looking to move from publishing into design and advertising. I had a dream.

So I walk into the art director or creative director or whoever’s office (I can’t remember, it was over 10 years ago) and looked out her office window. I was blown away by the view of the Bay Bridge from her desk. Plus, at that time CKS did a ton of work for Apple. Later, CKS merged with another company and became marchfirst. About 90 days later, marchfirst imploded in one of the first of many dot com casualties.

Now the ad network we work with on the mothership has offices there. Spectacular views and great people.

This shot was taken with the Canon G9 during a break in meetings. Not bad for a point and shoot. Not bad.

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