This is Michela, a fellow San Francisco photographer. I met her while I was down at Market/Powell with Brad, Travis, and Ben. It’s always great meeting other film shooters, our city is full of them.

Overall I am pretty pleased with my current workflow, save for some NR. As long as I take my time with the Crown Graphic, the exposure and focus are pretty spot on. I also worked on scanning my Morning/Mission sheets, I am up to 18 scanned so far. I still have pages of negatives, not to mention a box full of undeveloped film.

(2048×1630)

These old mopeds have made a sort of comeback in San Francisco, at least I keep seeing them more frequently. This Motobecane was at the corner of 24th and Hampshire, and I took this pretty early so i had to shoot at 1/25 and wide open. The light in the Mission doesn’t get bright enough until right near 8am.

I decided to start doing full resolution scans of my Morning/Mission images at 3200DPI. That yields ~350MB files, which become nice and sharp as I resize down to web-viewable proportions. I’ve also seen some bad newton rings as well, as a downside. I moved my scanning from the seldom used office to the living room hardwood floor, where the dust is actually much less. My scans are coming out fairly dust-free.

As I start to go my images I’m realizing some types of images I want to add to the set, so I think once I have gotten caught up with my film development I will go through another phase of shooting.

This is what’s been in my Domke bag over my shoulder for the past several weeks. I’ve been shooting a lot lately – mostly strolling around the Mission between 8 and 10 when it’s quiet, but lately in downtown with some other folks shooting street portraits. I’ve been shooting so much film lately that, despite my increased development throughput in the darkroom, I can’t keep up with the backlog. So I think I will recede from the scene a little and spend more time developing film. I have a lot of scanning to do, then decide what to do with all my Mission morning images. It’s a great problem to have.

• Crown Graphic with 135/4,7 Xenar
• Minolta Flashmeter VI
• Four Grafmatics
• Ilford HP5+
• Domke F-6 Little Bit Smaller bag
• Business cards with email and website URL
• Notepad and pen

After most of our shooting on Saturday, Brad, Travis and I went to High Tide for a drink. Travis wanted to take us to Cinnabar nearby, so we went there next. At the time of day we were there, it was pretty dead, but there was a very friendly bartender named Winnie, who agreed to let me take a picture of her. The bar was pretty dark, so I had her move all the way to the end, nearest the window.

As Brad and Travis and I were strolling through the Tenderloin, we stopped in front of Glide Memorial to talk to some of the workers there. As we were leaving I noticed this guy standing in front of the building and asked to take his picture after he asked about my old school camera (the Crown Graphic). This is probably the sharpest street portrait image (check out the large version). All in all, doing street portraits is rather fun. It’s stepping outside my normal comfort zone.

Last weekend I sent shooting with Brad Evans and Travis Jensen. Both are great at street portraits and I tagged along to get some practice with my Crown Graphic. It’s quite tough working quickly with the Crown, but by far the hardest part is nailing focus. It wasn’t helping that I was shooting nearly wide open. I’m so used to working more slowly and concentrating on focus. Next time I should stop down a bit more. In any case, I had a blast shooting with them. When I go out with one or two others, there’s an energy that helps motivate and carry me through shooting strangers.

At the end of the day we ended going to High Tide bar, then Cinnabar. I took this shot of Travis just outside of Cinnabar before we headed back to downtown.

On the concrete banister to the right of this car is written in marker, “Hipster House”. It’s the mark of anti-gentrification in San Francisco’s Mission District. I also love how two cars are wedged in this little crevice between houses. The neighborhood is full of little scenes like this.

As I start going through these shots that I’ve taken around the Mission, it’s inspiring to assemble them all in a collection or possibly a print-on-demand book.

This is Fabien Penso, photographer and software guy. I met him via Flickr, as I like to make contacts within San Francisco with folks shooting film. Fabien does street portraits with his Mamiya 7, a 6×7 format rangefinder. We met at Four Barrel for coffee, and just before parting we took quick portraits of each other.

Ilford HP5+, ISO 1600. Developed in Adonal 1+50 for 25 minutes.