08.14
The wife and I hit San Francisco earlier this week and, you know it, I brought along a few cameras.
Forgetting the lessons learned from a few vacations ago I figured my D300 and a few lenses would be a good thing to shlep around and photograph with but I soon remembered that, oh yeah, it’s heavy.
Sure, my new love, the Nikon AF Zoom-NIKKOR
80-200mm f/2.8D ED (one of Nikon’s best kept secrets by the way) is unbeatable and didn’t fail to impress, but after a few miles on foot, nothing says “superfluous” like a 120-300mm equivalent lens taking up room in a sholder bag.
Ultimately I fell back on, and had the most fun with, just my trusty Panasonic LX-3 and of course the Leica M3.
I also found that the iPhone was a great fallback when you just wanted to record something silly — and San Francisco has its fair share of silly — and tweet it.
I’ve never been much of a street photography shooter, but the Leica kind of lends itself to it and the touristy nature of a lot of SF makes cameras just part of the landscape so it’s very easy to just blend in. After a while I got pretty good at gauging focus and guessing exposure (f/8 and be there) and really had a lot of fun with it.
So we wandered all over SF by foot, strolling through Chinatown and riding the cable cars and whatnot — in short doing all the touristy things. We toured the USS Pampanito and the old Presidio and finally hopped on one of those open-top busses, because frankly we weren’t cold enough walking around on foot.
All in all a good time.
