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| CloudLayers | CloudLayers |
3rd place prize, January 2020. Sunset flight to the Big Island of Hawaii.
| 3rd place prize, January 2020. Sunset flight to the Big Island of Hawaii.
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| 3BearsFalls | 3BearsFalls |
Honorable mention, January 2020. Famous Maui waterfall on the road to Hana shot from the bridge over the river. My friends are standing at the bottom near the pool.
| Honorable mention, January 2020. Famous Maui waterfall on the road to Hana shot from the bridge over the river. My friends are standing at the bottom near the pool.
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| WailuaNuiStream | WailuaNuiStream |
Honorable mention, January 2020. Same river as above, shot from the other side of the same bridge.
| Honorable mention, January 2020. Same river as above, shot from the other side of the same bridge.
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| 4DHalfFace | 4DHalfFace |
Honorable mention, February 2020. Prototype of a puzzle I'm developing.
| Honorable mention, February 2020. Prototype of a puzzle I'm developing.
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| PreFog2 | PreFog2 |
2nd place prize, February 2020. Special category "Fog".
| 2nd place prize, February 2020. Special category "Fog".
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| SanRafaelPass2 | SanRafaelPass2 |
Honorable mention, February 2020. Special category "Fog".
| Honorable mention, February 2020. Special category "Fog".
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| BridgeBattery | BridgeBattery |
Honorable mention, March 2020. During the covid-19 city lock-down there are very few people out and about. This is an old gun implacement next to the Golden Gate Bridge.
| Honorable mention, March 2020. During the covid-19 city lock-down there are very few people out and about. This is an old gun implacement next to the Golden Gate Bridge.
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| TinyRainbow | TinyRainbow |
3rd place prize, April 2020. From my rooftop looking towards the East Bay.
| 3rd place prize, April 2020. From my rooftop looking towards the East Bay.
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| CloudsOverGGB | CloudsOverGGB |
Honorable mention, April 2020.
| Honorable mention, April 2020.
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| QuarantineShopping1 | QuarantineShopping1 |
4th place prize, April 2020. Special category "Quarantine". Grocery shopping has become one of the most dangerous activities during the coronavirus lockdown.
| 4th place prize, April 2020. Special category "Quarantine". Grocery shopping has become one of the most dangerous activities during the coronavirus lockdown.
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| QuarantineShopping2 | QuarantineShopping2 |
Honorable mention, April 2020. Special category "Quarantine". My local Safeway is serious about safety.
| Honorable mention, April 2020. Special category "Quarantine". My local Safeway is serious about safety.
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| Fragility | Fragility |
2nd place prize, May 2020. Extreme closeup/macro of a nearly perfect dandelion on the vollyball field near the SF marina. Image separation was about one millimeter.
| 2nd place prize, May 2020. Extreme closeup/macro of a nearly perfect dandelion on the vollyball field near the SF marina. Image separation was about one millimeter.
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| PalaceQuarantineHRES | PalaceQuarantineHRES |
Honorable mention, May 2020. Special category "Creative". Playing with the "super resolution" phone setting. Thankfully the man in the photo stood lock still for several minutes because the image isn't much without him.
| Honorable mention, May 2020. Special category "Creative". Playing with the "super resolution" phone setting. Thankfully the man in the photo stood lock still for several minutes because the image isn't much without him.
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| PacificHeightsHRES | PacificHeightsHRES |
Honorable mention, May 2020. Special category "Creative". Another experiment with super resolution.
| Honorable mention, May 2020. Special category "Creative". Another experiment with super resolution.
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| ILM_Pano2 | ILM_Pano2 |
Honorable mention, May 2020. Special category "Creative". 2x3 grid of images for each eye using phone's "PanoSphere" mode.
| Honorable mention, May 2020. Special category "Creative". 2x3 grid of images for each eye using phone's "PanoSphere" mode.
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| BlackAndWhite | BlackAndWhite |
3rd place prize, June 2020. Special category "Protest". A very powerful BLM prop at a sunset memorial for George Floyd. The fist is a 3D "low poly" constructed in card stock and covered with the names of all the black people recently murdered by police.
| 3rd place prize, June 2020. Special category "Protest". A very powerful BLM prop at a sunset memorial for George Floyd. The fist is a 3D "low poly" constructed in card stock and covered with the names of all the black people recently murdered by police.
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| HappySquirrel | HappySquirrel |
2nd place prize, July 2020. Friends met for a birthday in the SF botanical gardens and we were visited by this bold squirel. I gave her a strawberry and she allowed me to approach very closely for this snap with my new RED Hydrogen One stereo phone. It's my first dependable stereo camera and it's a very quirky phone but it was very cheap and I'm enjoying it a lot so far.
| 2nd place prize, July 2020. Friends met for a birthday in the SF botanical gardens and we were visited by this bold squirel. I gave her a strawberry and she allowed me to approach very closely for this snap with my new RED Hydrogen One stereo phone. It's my first dependable stereo camera and it's a very quirky phone but it was very cheap and I'm enjoying it a lot so far.
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| EstuarySunset | EstuarySunset |
4th place prize, July 12th 2020. Caught the sun throwing shadows all over the sky at sunset.
| 4th place prize, July 12th 2020. Caught the sun throwing shadows all over the sky at sunset.
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| SunsetToast | SunsetToast |
Honorable mention, July 2020. A group of young people drinking and socializing at Crissy Field.
| Honorable mention, July 2020. A group of young people drinking and socializing at Crissy Field.
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| EscapingRecursion | EscapingRecursion |
2nd place prize, July 2020. Special category "Through the Window". Also selected as one of the top 5 images of the year 2020! This is me, trapped in infinite levels of my own creation, attempting to get out by hitting the 'escape' key on my creator's computer. This was an experiment with a Droste effect stereogram. To do this, I started with a stereo snapshot of my hand on my laptop. Then I copied the left eye image and scaled it to fit the left image of the monitor, and similarly for the right; repeating several times. Note that each time I copy and paste half the image into itself, the number of levels doubles. So doing this 4 times, generates 16 levels. Adding the hands coming out was much harder as I did that one level at a time. It also required carefully creating a selection region so that pasting a hand into it wouldn't spill over the edge of the monitor it is emerging from. Placing a hand in the right eye after placing the left one had to also be done carefully to get the stereo depth correct, and a couple of these were done badly. All in all it took about 2 hours a day for 4 days to develop the idea, capture appropriate shots, and do the editing; and I'm not sure it was worth the effort. At least if I later attempt a more artistic version of this idea, I'll be better prepared.
| 2nd place prize, July 2020. Special category "Through the Window". Also selected as one of the top 5 images of the year 2020! This is me, trapped in infinite levels of my own creation, attempting to get out by hitting the 'escape' key on my creator's computer. This was an experiment with a Droste effect stereogram. To do this, I started with a stereo snapshot of my hand on my laptop. Then I copied the left eye image and scaled it to fit the left image of the monitor, and similarly for the right; repeating several times. Note that each time I copy and paste half the image into itself, the number of levels doubles. So doing this 4 times, generates 16 levels. Adding the hands coming out was much harder as I did that one level at a time. It also required carefully creating a selection region so that pasting a hand into it wouldn't spill over the edge of the monitor it is emerging from. Placing a hand in the right eye after placing the left one had to also be done carefully to get the stereo depth correct, and a couple of these were done badly. All in all it took about 2 hours a day for 4 days to develop the idea, capture appropriate shots, and do the editing; and I'm not sure it was worth the effort. At least if I later attempt a more artistic version of this idea, I'll be better prepared.
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| MirrorMirror | MirrorMirror |
3rd place prize, July 2020. Special category "Through the Window". This was a much easier way to get a Droste effect by using the recursive images you may have seen from a pair of mirrors facing each other, or a video camera pointed at its own display. No image manipulation was required at all, and this composition is exactly what the camera saw when I took the picture. This was done by shooting it with the front facing camera so that the reflection in the mirror includes the camera's display of itself. What made it easy was the fact that the RED Hydrogen One phone has a pair of very closely placed stereo cameras on the front side. It's hard for me to imagine why they bothered to do that, and I never use my phone's front facing cameras anyway, so I never thought I'd need it, until I had the idea for this image. The real difficulty was the lighting. Pushing the phone close enough to the mirror to get the desired effect naturally blocks most direct light on the subject. That plus the loss of resolution with each level meant that I wouldn't be able to go nearly as deep as in the above recursive laptop image. Most of my time was therefore spent trying various combinations of mirrors and lighting angles to make it go as deep as I could, which turned out to be 3 levels. I was lucky that the best combination of mirror and background happened to make a pleasant image.
| 3rd place prize, July 2020. Special category "Through the Window". This was a much easier way to get a Droste effect by using the recursive images you may have seen from a pair of mirrors facing each other, or a video camera pointed at its own display. No image manipulation was required at all, and this composition is exactly what the camera saw when I took the picture. This was done by shooting it with the front facing camera so that the reflection in the mirror includes the camera's display of itself. What made it easy was the fact that the RED Hydrogen One phone has a pair of very closely placed stereo cameras on the front side. It's hard for me to imagine why they bothered to do that, and I never use my phone's front facing cameras anyway, so I never thought I'd need it, until I had the idea for this image. The real difficulty was the lighting. Pushing the phone close enough to the mirror to get the desired effect naturally blocks most direct light on the subject. That plus the loss of resolution with each level meant that I wouldn't be able to go nearly as deep as in the above recursive laptop image. Most of my time was therefore spent trying various combinations of mirrors and lighting angles to make it go as deep as I could, which turned out to be 3 levels. I was lucky that the best combination of mirror and background happened to make a pleasant image.
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| Wizard | Wizard |
Honorable mention, August 2020. Came across a Harry Potter nerd and her photographer at the Palace of Fine Arts and asked if I could take her picture. Not much depth, but a cute moment.
| Honorable mention, August 2020. Came across a Harry Potter nerd and her photographer at the Palace of Fine Arts and asked if I could take her picture. Not much depth, but a cute moment.
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| Up2 | Up2 |
First place prize, August 2020. Special category "Composite" in which we all modified one person's empty image (a back alley) to make it as interesting as possible. The man was taken from the Elton John album "Diving Board". The Earth was a stereogram I made from frames of a video from the ISS, and the woman and water spout were shamelessly stolen from the web.
| First place prize, August 2020. Special category "Composite" in which we all modified one person's empty image (a back alley) to make it as interesting as possible. The man was taken from the Elton John album "Diving Board". The Earth was a stereogram I made from frames of a video from the ISS, and the woman and water spout were shamelessly stolen from the web.
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| AlleyCuddle | AlleyCuddle |
Images I took at a huge photo shoot during a furry convention.
| Images I took at a huge photo shoot during a furry convention.
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| StIgnatousChurchThroughSculpture | StIgnatousChurchThroughSculpture |
Second place prize, September 2020. Found this lovely blue stone sculpture on the grounds of the University of San Francisco on Turk Blvd. Found a nice way to use it to frame the St. Ignatous Church in the distance.
| Second place prize, September 2020. Found this lovely blue stone sculpture on the grounds of the University of San Francisco on Turk Blvd. Found a nice way to use it to frame the St. Ignatous Church in the distance.
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| Artemis1 | Artemis1 |
Honorable mention, September 2020. Special category "Speed". Screen grabs from YouTube video titled SLS VS Starship: Why does SLS still exist?!.
| Honorable mention, September 2020. Special category "Speed". Screen grabs from YouTube video titled SLS VS Starship: Why does SLS still exist?!.
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| FlyingSquirrel | FlyingSquirrel |
4th place prize, September 2020. Special category "Speed". Last snap of my HappySquirrel image above, just as she leaped away.
| 4th place prize, September 2020. Special category "Speed". Last snap of my HappySquirrel image above, just as she leaped away.
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| CarRepair | CarRepair |
Frist place prize, October 2020, and also the top image of the year. My first top image of the year ever! Saw this fellow in Bayview behind Lowes attempting make temporary repairs to a car while a couple unhappy people waited. I don't think he understood much English but was happy enough to get back to work when I waved towards his work.
| Frist place prize, October 2020, and also the top image of the year. My first top image of the year ever! Saw this fellow in Bayview behind Lowes attempting make temporary repairs to a car while a couple unhappy people waited. I don't think he understood much English but was happy enough to get back to work when I waved towards his work.
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| UrbanForest | UrbanForest |
Second place prize, October 2020. Rental cherry pickers in front of Professional Contractor Supply in the Bayview neighborhood of SF.
| Second place prize, October 2020. Rental cherry pickers in front of Professional Contractor Supply in the Bayview neighborhood of SF.
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| MarinaSunset2020-11-6-Sunbather | MarinaSunset2020-11-6-Sunbather |
3rd place prize, November 2020. Another beautiful sunset sky. This one seemed a little empty so I decided to drop in a stolen image of a sunbather. What amazed me was how such a tiny figure completely changed the image. Before it was easy for your eye to wander all around enjoying the view, but after the addition, it the figure grabs your eye and makes it all about her. Fascenating.
| 3rd place prize, November 2020. Another beautiful sunset sky. This one seemed a little empty so I decided to drop in a stolen image of a sunbather. What amazed me was how such a tiny figure completely changed the image. Before it was easy for your eye to wander all around enjoying the view, but after the addition, it the figure grabs your eye and makes it all about her. Fascenating.
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| GreenFronds | GreenFronds |
Honorable mention, November 2020. Simple small interior space found in an attractive bush.
| Honorable mention, November 2020. Simple small interior space found in an attractive bush.
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| Vegas | Vegas |
4th place prize, November 2020. Special category "Nighttime". Screen grabs from a YouTube video titled Las Vegas isn't Las Vegas.
| 4th place prize, November 2020. Special category "Nighttime". Screen grabs from a YouTube video titled Las Vegas isn't Las Vegas.
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| Starlink | Starlink |
Honorable mention, November 2020. Special category "Nighttime". More screen grabs from a YouTube video titled SpaceX Starship SN5 150m flight countdown, Starlink Beta, Minotaur IV Launch and Skylab Anniversary.
| Honorable mention, November 2020. Special category "Nighttime". More screen grabs from a YouTube video titled SpaceX Starship SN5 150m flight countdown, Starlink Beta, Minotaur IV Launch and Skylab Anniversary.
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