I had a great time out photowalking last Thursday night with a great SF crew around downtown SF. The walk was hosted by the always awesome Microsoft store in San Francisco (go check them out in the Westfield Centre in SF).
Thank you to everyone who came out for the walk. It was great to see old friends and also make some new ones. 
We started out the walk in the center itself and got some nice photos of the great dome. From there we made our way up Powell Street, shooting some of the local color around Union Square and eventually made our way to the very top of Nob Hill. Originally we planned for the walk to take a turn down California Street and head towards downtown, but we were sort of distracted by the always imposing and always grand Fairmont Hotel atop Nob Hill.
We explored the lobby of the Fairmont and an elevator of us also somehow found our way to the top of the hotel with some of the most amazing views of San Francisco that exist.
After our fun at the Fairmont we headed back down California and cut through Chinatown to shoot this distinctive SF neighborhood.
Finally we finished up our way back up Market Street back to the Microsoft store where our ever so gracious host treated us to a spread of food and drinks to finish up an eventful walk.
During the walk folks uploaded their photos from their mobile phones directly to a OneDrive account and we got to watch them in full high res glory on the Microsoft store’s 110 inch LCD display while we refueled on artichoke hearts and chicken skewers.
I was super impressed with so many of the great shots that people got on the walk. If you want to see some of what was shot check out these photos on Flickr here.
I shot with two cameras on the walk. I shot with my trusty Canon 5D Mark III and on mobile I shot with one of the Nokia Lumia 1020 mobile phones.
All of the photos that are in this blog post were shot with the Lumia 1020. The camera on this phone is the best camera on any phone at present. The phone has a 41 megapixel(!) camera that actually shoots in RAW! It’s got a Zeiss lens and I was super impressed with what it was able to do. I liked that the camera could be used in 100% manual mode. Having more granular control over what I was trying to do with it was really helpful. You can pick this phone up for $ 49 with a contract here.
*Disclosure: this walk and post were sponsored by Microsoft and I received compensation for working with them on it.
Thomas Hawk Digital Connection
