I was down in SoCal this past week and got to catch up with an old friend, Jonathan. It also happened to coincide with the birth of his brand new baby girl, Ayumi. I don't get down to SoCal nearly as much as I should. Hopefully I can make it down there more in 2010.
I have some mixed memories of Chinatown in San Francisco. Growing up, I honestly thought all San Francisco had to offer were these dingy streets filled with short angry old ladies, vegetables hanging out on the sidewalks, and meat hanging in windows. I've since realized that Chinatown is only a small part of San Francisco. Anyway, these are some old pictures I had taken when I was just walking around with my camera. Kinda random. But I never got around to posting this pics. Just some random street photography.
I bet this little girl thought I was some random tourist taking pictures.
I used to swim in high school, but that was a long time ago - I won't say how long. I recently had an opportunity to go watch my younger cousin Aaron swim a race at a recent swim meet he had. He had a few events, the 100 Freestyle, 100 Butterfly, 100 Breast, and the 200 IM(Individual Medley). He reminds me a little of myself when I swan. I also swam IM and my best stroke was my backstroke. =)
Anyway, I was excited to get a chance to take some pictures of Aaron in action. So I pulled out the 70-200mm in my endeavor to capture some swimming. I think this is probably my favorite from that day - Aaron swimming the butterfly leg of the 200 IM - just as he's at the end of his stroke.
On a photography related note, the meet took place in the late afternoon while the sun still was still pretty harsh and there was a pretty harsh shadow halfway down the lane. I started shooting in Manual mode but everytime I crossed that stupid shadow, my settings were horribly off. So this is one of the few instances I've ever used Shutter Priority(Tv) and set the shutter at 1/1000 sec. This way I knew my shutter would be fast enough to freeze the action, and still compensate the other settings to maintain the shutter speed. Bad, variable lighting? Try using Shutter Priority.
