the life and times of Allan Chen

open land

Originally uploaded by kaiyen

This is the view from the back porch of the apartment where my wife stays in Paso Robles, while she is there working at a local hospital as a nurse. I personally wanted to go trekking around all the land there, but everything belongs to someone and everyone owns guns so I figured I shouldn’t do that. But this, from a back porch, is astounding. I could not get over it.

I wanted a better view of the sunlight as it set on that vineyard that is dead center but all of the roads are much lower than the actual cultivated land so I couldn’t get up there. But it’s still beautiful.

3 stop graduated ND filter plus a polarizer. Allowed the foreground to come out with good detail while making the sky nice and controlled.

The truly amazing thing is that, again, this is from her patio.  This incredible view, right there.  And at night, I can see more stars than I did while I was in Death Valley.  I could almost make out the entire Big Dipper and could find the North Star almost immediately.

a walk along the beach

Originally uploaded by kaiyen

From just after Christmas through New Years, my wife and I were down around Paso Robles, in the Central Coast area of California (Paso’s not really on the coast, but that whole area is called that). This area includes Paso, San Miguel, Templeton, Atascadero, and San Luis Obispo. It also extends southward towards Pismo Beach, and north towards Cambria (by Hearst Castle). I think that covers it for the most part.

My wife works down in Templeton as a nurse. It’s about 2.5 hours south of our home in Santa Clara. It’s tough having her away 3-4 days a week but the job market is how it is for new nursing graduates and this is a good, growing hospital that will get her the experience she needs.

So, technically she was down there for work and I was visiting, but there was a gap during which we were able to drive around and explore that area a bit. We went to SLO, Pismo, Cambria, Morro Bay and up to Hearst Castle as well.

This particular photo is of the pier at Pismo Beach at sunset. It’s geo-tagged so you can see where it is if you go to flickr and look at the map. My wife and I actually stayed just up the beach a few years ago so it was nice to see it again.

Also of note is that this photo was taken with a Panasonic TZ3, a super-zoom compact camera. So I carry around all these big DSLR cameras and expensive lenses and my wife was using this tiny compact camera. The camera does a great job with metering and has great color rendition. It did a great job with the sunset.

train graffiti

Originally uploaded by kaiyen

I have been doing a lot of photography of graffiti lately. A lot of it is for my alleyways project, but sometimes there is just something about it that draws me in.

This 5×7 negative is so detailed you can see the texture of the metal on the side of the train freight car right on the negative. I increased the contrast quite a bit in an attempt to put some more punch to it, but hopefully it works out.

I also enjoy that this is a formal sign, saying that the car is leased to the Union train line, yet is also tagged with a particular graffiti artist’s work.

train tracks

Originally uploaded by kaiyen

I have finally been able to scan some of my large format – 5×7 – negatives of late, as whole, single-pass scans, rather than trying to merge two partials together. This is of course a crop, as there was a lot of useless dirt material in the foreground. And I went with a very heavy hand on contrast. But I really like the two lines converging together and the detail in the 100% image – which is 2GB, btw – is incredible. 5×7 truly is a great format, and I fully intend to put together a show at some point where it’s all contact prints of 5×7’s and/or straight slides. I just got a box of 5×7 slides and I intend to go out tomorrow for some shooting. I am very excited.

Photography has become fun for me again, and that means a lot.