Thanksgiving Sunset, photo by Harold Davis. View this image larger.
Thanksgiving in the Bay area was overcast and cloudy. Just before sunset there was a break in the clouds to the west, and I snapped this photo.
[Canon Powershot G9, multi-processed RAW file, 44mm (210mm in 35mm terms), manual exposure mode, 1/60 of a second at f/8 and ISO 100, hand held.]
Fog on the Headlands, photo by Harold Davis. View this image larger.
On a brilliant, sunny autumn afternoon Mark and I left the Tennessee Valley parking lot. Past the horse barns we climbed the Old Springs Trail to the Miwok Trail. We followed the Miwok Trail to the Wolf Ridge Trail, and then headed for the heights facing the ocean as the sun set into a fog bank. Two minutes later we were surrounded by fog as well. We made our way back down the trail in a thick fog and gathering dusk. The fog opened once for a few seconds in the twilight to give this view of Mount Tamalpais across Tennessee Valley.
[Nikon D300, 18-200mm VR zoom lens at 31mm (46.5mm in 35mm terms), four exposures combined in Photoshop (1/3 of a second, 1 second, 2 seconds, and 4 seconds) at f/5.6 and ISO 100, tripod mounted.]
Hike to Pirate’s Cove, photo by Harold Davis. View this image larger.
Julian had the afternoon off from school, so we took advantage of the beautiful weather and hiked to Pirate’s Cove, the notch in the rugged Marin Headlands coast about half way up the left side of this photo. On the walk back to Muir Beach, we stopped to snap this photo of the last light of an autumn sunset.
[Nikon D200, 12-24mm Zoom lens at 24mm (36mm in 35mm terms), 1/2 a second at f/14 and ISO 100, tripod mounted.]
We Are Not Alone, photo by Harold Davis. View this image larger.
Mark and I climbed to the top of a hill in Tiburon. There was a clear view north towards the Richmond Bridge. At this time of year, the sun sets early, and soon it was getting darker and colder. Fog was coming in through the Golden Gate and spreading across the Bay, but the northern vista was still clear.
This is a stacked composite consisting of 15 exposures made with my 10.5mm digital fisheye lens. Each exposure was shot at 4 minutes, ISO 100, and f/5.6. The total elapsed exposure time was thus about an hour.
Note that with all the ambient light in the city sky, the star trails are not as bright as they are in a darker environment. For example, the stars seem very bright indeed in this version of Starry Night, which shows the Yosemite sky.
The green line across the foreground is a ferry boat that made its way into Larkspur during a couple of the exposures.
Bridge from a Different Angle, photo by Harold Davis. View this image larger.
There’s always a new angle from which to photograph the Golden Gate Bridge. This image is from the trail on my way up from Kirby Cove on my way to Battery Spencer and the parking lot.
[Nikon D300, 18-200mm VR zoom lens at 18mm (27mm in 35mm terms), three exposures combined in Photoshop, each exposure at f/5.6 and ISO 100, tripod mounted: 240 seconds, 90 seconds, and 60 seconds.]
Under the Bridge, photo by Harold Davis. View this image larger.
Briefly noted: Multitasking while shooting star trails for stacking at Kirby Cove, I captured this view of the North tower of the Golden Gate Bridge with the Bay Bridge underneath. A somewhat different take on the same composition as 2 Bridge Vu (third down on the linked page). The point of the photo for me is the reflection of the tower on the water, and how it visually behaves over the course of the two minute exposure. Here’s another bridge tower reflection in the surf.
[Nikon D300, 18-200VR zoom lens at 46mm (69mm in 35mm terms), 60 seconds at f/8 andf ISO 100, tripod mounted.]
Bridge and Stars, photo by Harold Davis. View this image larger.
Last night at Kirby Cove the weather was balmy. I ate a chicken sandwich from Bakesale Betty’s in the dark and called home to say goodnight to the kids while the timer took care of generating thirteen exposures, each at four minutes and f/5.6 (ISO 100). I had to throw away one of the exposures later because the airplane trails in it were just too distracting.
It’s surprisingly hard to eat a Bakesale Betty chicken sandwich in the dark.
The ambient light from San Francisco made the stars relatively less bright compared to the wilderness, and I wasn’t pointed north so my circles were smaller.
I combined in an eight minute exposure at f/4 to get the details of the beach, so my combined exposure time was about 54 minutes. It’s amazing what happens to lights and motion over this much time, witness the stars, reflections in the water, and if you look carefully the telltale lights of a huge container ship passing through the Golden Gate. (You can see this better in the larger size.)
[Nikon D300, 10.5mm digital fisheye, 12 captures at 4 minutes each and f/5.6, one capture at 8 minutes and f/4, all captures at ISO 100 and tripod mounted, combined in Photoshop using the Statistics script.]
Line Dance, photo by Harold Davis. View this image larger.
From Sutro Heights Park in San Francisco, there’s a straight vista down Ocean Beach and the so-called Great Highway to the south past Golden Gate Park.
As dusk turned to night I stopped down my lens to create as long an exposure as possible. I love the effects that car lights make when it gets dark. Car lights in long exposures are almost as exciting and interesting as star trails
Here are some other images that use car lights in motion over time: Tioga Pass Road at Night, North Berkeley at Night, Ghosts of Mare Island, On My Way to Visit Katie Rose, Darkness Revealed, Golden Gate at Night, S-Curve, Cars.
[Nikon D300, 18-200 VR Zoom lens at 200mm (300mm in 35mm terms), 30 seconds at f/29 and ISO 100, tripod mounted.]
San Francisco from the Sea, photo by Harold Davis. View this image larger.
This is a night view across the outer opening of the Golden Gate towards the lights of the Pacific face of San Francisco: the Outer Sunset District and maybe a bit of Daly City and Pacifica. The photo was taken in the Marin Headlands on the heights above Tennessee Beach.
Looking at the bright flare of light from the city on the left versus the dark night filled with stars on the right I’m struck by how much light pollution we create, even in fairly remote places (to see what I mean, check out this image of Yosemite at night from Half Dome). In this connection, I’m encouraged by a recent movement intended to help the stars take back the night.
[Nikon D300, 10.5mm digital fisheye, 321 seconds (about six minutes) at f/4 and ISO 100, tripod mounted.]
Wandering the dark mid-level tiers of Fort Point in the shadow of the Golden Gate Bridge I came upon a window without glass. This is the same window I photographed a couple of years back with dirty glass and a happy face. The photo below shows the span of the Golden Gate through the open window, and the bottom photo shows the bottom of one of the towers.
There was, of course, a dynamic range problem with these images. Even given the inherent dynamic range within RAW captures, I needed to take separate exposures for the scene through the window and the embrasures themselves. It’s important when combining images to extend the dyamic range to maintain the same f-stop in the images, so I shot both sets of exposures stopped down to f/22 to create a high depth-of-field effect in the foregrounds. There’s a twenty times difference in shutter speed between the exposure for the inside of the window and the exposures for the brighter Golden Gate span.
I used Liquid Mask to quickly pop out the window from the versions shot for the distance so I could slide it on top of the versions exposed for the window frame.
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Speaking of the Golden Gate, if you are in the Bay area, I will be making a presentation about 100 Views of the Golden Gate on Sunday, July 27 at 2PM at Book Passage in the San Francisco Ferry Building (more info about the event). I’ll discuss the artistic connection with Hokusai and Japanese art and ideas, the aesthetic and spiritual dimensions of the bridge, the landscape of the Golden Gate in the context of the Bay area, and some of the photo techniques I used during the years I made the photos in this book.
View this image larger.
[Both images: Photoshop composites of two exposures at 1/20 of a second and at 1 second, Nikon D300, 18-200VR Zoom lens, f/22 and ISO 100, tripod mounted. Top image shot at 29mm (44.5mm in 35mm terms), image above shot at 22mm (33mm in 35mm terms).]
Dome of St Ignatius Church, photo by Harold Davis. View this image larger.
Briefly noted: this is the dome of the Jesuit St Ignatius Church, adjacent to San Francisco University. Related image: San Francisco City Hall dome.
[Nikon D300, 18-200mm VR zoom lens at 56mm (84mm in 35mm terms), 10 seconds at f/13 and ISO 100, tripod mounted.]
Tuesday evening I gave a presentation to the Marin Photo Club about night photography, then drove into San Francisco to visit Katie Rose in the hospital. My drive took me across the Golden Gate Bridge, and I pulled off in the Presidio Bluffs area for a little night photography of my own.
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It’s easy to get to the Presidio Bluffs, just to the southwest of the Golden Gate Bridge on the San Francisco side. There’s some construction going on among the military ruins in the area, but as night locations go it doesn’t feel remote.
To get the views in this story, I followed a path to a stair up an old battery, and then climbed a ladder to the top. From there I had a straight shot at the bridge.
Compared to some of the places I shoot at night, this didn’t feel at all precarious. All the same, I was glad to have my headlamp with me.
This had been a hot day in the Bay area, so I almost didn’t carry my sweater with me. I’m glad I did, because fog rolled in through the Golden Gate, along with a chill wind off the ocean.
The fog hit the bridge, and diffused the light, creating the pools of light of different color temperatures in the atmosphere aroung the bridge.
View this image larger.
Mostly, these were short exposures in terms of some of the deep night images I make. I made two five minute captures, but the rest of the series were of shorter duration. I spent about an hour taking pictures, then my patience wore out, I packed up, and went off to hold my darling Katie Rose.
Briefly noted: The more distant view of the bridge is a composite of five exposures with 150X range (see the technical data below). I layered these different exposures to make a composite in Photoshop, with the bright light stars of the street lamps coming from the longest exposure. It’s interesting that the scene presented exposure values with such a wide dynamic range.
Related link: 100 Views of the Golden Gate.
[Both images: Nikon D300, 70-200mm VR zoom lens, tripod mounted. Far above: TC-20E 2X teleconverter for an effective focal length of 380mm (570mm in 35mm terms), 10 seconds at f/11 and ISO 100. Immediately above: 90mm (135mm in 35mm terms), five exposures at time durations from 300 seconds (5 minutes) to 2 seconds, f/22 and ISO 100.]
Here’s the copy from the publisher’s to-the-book-trade postcard advertising my new book, 100 Views of the Golden Gate.
The Golden Gate as you’ve never seen it before…Now available, 100 Views of the Golden Gate by Harold Davis from Wilderness Press.
With a bow to the Japanese artist Katsushika Hokusai (1760-1849) whose woodblock series 100 Views of Mt. Fuji celebrates Japan’s iconic mountain, Bay Area native Harold Davis has created a collection of over 100 striking digital photographs of the Golden Gate—the strait that connects the San Francisco Bay to the Pacific Ocean and the Bridge itself—as well as back stories for each photo.
Author of several photography books, Harold Davis is a frequent speaker on digital techniques at Bay Area venues, ranging from Book Passage to MacWorld.
100 Views of the Golden Gate by Harold Davis: $30 * 1st edition * hardcover * full-color * 176 pages * 9 1/2 X 10 * ISBN 978-0-89997-447-7
Normandy Village Stair, photo by Harold Davis. View this image larger.
Wandering around Berkeley, California just north of the UC Berkeley campus, I thought I’d fallen through a rabbit hole into an alternative universe. (Maybe the giant cyclatron on campus had malfunctioned, and I had?)
There was a maze of cobblestone alleys, courtyards, gargoyles, and twisting stairs (see view below to get the general feeling). I stopped to photograph, and learned that the area is called Normandy Village. It was designed by William Yelland to replicate a French village, shortly after Yelland’s stint in France during the first World War.
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Crossing the Richmond Bridge, photo by Harold Davis. View this image larger.
Driving back from visiting Katie Rose, my camera was still set at ISO 2,000 for the dim light in the NICU. It’s probably not where I would have set it to photograph this reflection in the back of a tanker truck on the lower deck of the Richmond-San Rafael Bridge. But the high ISO served to give me a fast shutter speed and some depth of field, despite the relatively shadowed conditions of the lower deck.
[Nikon D300, 18-200mm VR zoom lens at 75mm (112.5mm in 35mm terms), 1/800 of a second at f/14 and ISO 2000, handheld, image stabilization engaged.]
