I had a couple of hours to spare in San Francisco earlier this month, so I walked around Chinatown with my camera. I wanted to show Chinatown as part of San Francisco. The city’s iconic Transamerica Pyramid is a few blocks from Chinatown, so I took a view looking towards the Bay. I did a little touchup in Photoshop, but the picture is mostly about pointing the camera.

My original wide angle shot shows converging vertical lines:

The image was captured with a Nikon D7000 in raw mode, with an 18 – 55 mm zoom at the widest angle. Raw mode provides some ability to lighten the shadows and darken the highlights in the high contrast image. The round bright light in the shop on the lower left seems distractingly bright. I selected it with the magic wand tool in Photoshop and filled it with 50% gray.

After that, and using Camera Distortion filter to take out most of the perspective convergence, the image becomes:

A 1920 × 1280 version of the image is here. The larger version reveals the details of the environment: signs in English and in Chinese, the busy shops, and, if you look carefully, a glimpse of the Bay. It’s a picture of what was happening on that day.