I took this photo from the end of the Berkeley Pier several years ago. Looking through my files recently, I was struck by the contrast between the colorful sailboat and everything else.
[600mm in 35mm terms, 1/1000 of a seond at f/5.6 and ISO 200, tripod mounted.]
On Monday afternoon Mark and I went out hunting for photos. Berkeley was in its own globe of sunshine. When I looked across the Bay, fog was creeping through the Golden Gate and up the slopes of Mount Tamalpais. Mark suggested the top of Mt Tam would be clear, and it might be interesting to shoot the sunset from above the fog.
We drove up the slopes of Mt Tam through intermittent fog and scattered sunshine. From the ridgeline, the Pacific Ocean was buried in a sea of fog. I exposed using as small an aperture as possible, hoping to exagerate the rays of the sun.
[72mm in 35mm terms, 1/8 of a second at f/29 and ISO 100, tripod mounted.]
This is the suspension bridge over to the Point Bonita Lighthouse.
[36mm in 35mm terms, 7.1 seconds at f/25 and ISO 100, tripod mounted.]
Phyllis and I left the kids with Rachel this afternoon, and we went to visit the De Young Museum in San Francisco. This is a photo of the vast and wonderful roof of the new museum building from the observation tower. I used my Canon Powershot G9 “toy” camera (I never could have brought my backpack full of gear and tripod into the museum).
The sun in this photo framing the tower of the Golden Gate Bridge, and, for that matter, all suns in the photo other than the real sun, are caused by an optical phenomenon called double refraction. (Double refraction is also called birefringence).
In double refraction, each ray of light separates into two rays (the “ordinary” ray and the “extraordinary” ray) when the light heads through the lens. The extra suns are in my photo caused by the extraordinary rays. The birefringence effect is dependent on how the light is polarized.
Normally, you’d want to avoid something like double refraction in your photos (although, avoid as much as can, you’ll likely see some if you shoot directly into the sun with a long lens as I did in this photo).
But last night I was feeling bored, and I knew I had more than enough photos in my files for my Golden Gate project, so I amplified the effect by adding a polarizing filter in front of my lens, and rotating the outer ring of the filter to change the direction of polarization until the subsidiary “sun” was in position.
[375mm in 35mm terms, circular polarizer, 1/750 of a second at f/9 and ISO 100, tripod mounted.]
Sometimes things come together and the view out the Golden Gate is glorious. All you have to do is stand there and press the shutter release.
[180mm in 35mm terms, 1/800 of a second at f/11 and ISO 200, handheld.]
On a full moon night, I photographed from Kirby Cove. The moon was rising from behind and below the Golden Gate Bridge. As the moon rose, it seemed to be in position to “roll” along the suspension lines.
I exposed so that some of the background would be apparent, causing the moon itself to blow out with overexposure (this is seen more often with the sun than the moon). When I post-processed, I decided to leave the high contrast effect intact.
[600mm in 35mm terms, 2 seconds at f/5.6 and ISO 100, tripod mounted.]
The Adventure Cat is a catamaran used for sail-powered tours of San Francisco Bay, and around the Golden Gate Bridge. Somehow, the Adventure Cat seems to turn up in many of my photos of the Golden Gate. I guess she’s there just about at sunset, and so am I.
By the way (and there’s absolutely no inducement for me to say this), sailing with the Adventure Cat is great fun. I do recommend it.
These four photos are from my 2005 archives. It turns out the winter of 2005 was specially good for sunsets in the San Francisco Bay area.
Each photo is a sunset view of the Golden Gate from across the San Francisco Bay. They’re all arguments for carefully archiving all of one’s photos, even if the photo isn’t processed right away.
Each of these images is a candidate for inclusion in my Golden Gate book. Let me know which one you like (or if you like more than one).
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I like the way this three second time exposure makes the car lights look abstracted but still recognizable. I took this photo early in the evening from the location across the mouth of the Waldo Tunnel described in Alignment. I used a long lens, my 70-200 VR zoom combined with a 2X telextender at the maximum focal length. The 400mm effective focal length translates to 600mm in 35mm terms, considering the Nikon 1.5:1 sensor equivalence. In Photoshop, I cropped further in on the portion of the photo that interested me, namely the bridge roadway, walkways, and car lights. It probably goes without saying, but let me say it: cropping in on an image in post-processing is the logical equivalent of using a so-called “digital” zoom in-camera. [600mm in 35mm terms, 3 seconds at f/22 and ISO 100, tripod mounted.] View this image larger. |
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Treasure Island juts out into San Francisco Bay. Often windy, this forlorn ex-military base has now been partially converted to housing projects. The housing stock is seedy and decaying.
The shoreline of Treasure Island, where I took these photos, is one of the easiest straight shots of the Golden Gate. The only hazard or danger is the merge back onto the Bay Bridge at Yerba Buena Island when you head home. Particularly in the Oakland direction, the merge is a true adrenaline rush.
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I’ve been photographing the Golden Gate for years now (quite literally) for a book project at all seasons, in different weather, and from as many good locations as I can find. I can’t believe it, the project is coming to an end. The book is at the point of design, and I have a pool of more photos (shown here as a Flickr set) than I can possibly use. Still, this is the use it or lose it moment. So I’ve been going back through my archives, and post-processing worthy photo candidates.
The Point Bonita Lighthouse guards the southern side of the entrance to the Golden Gate, so I guess this photo counts as a possibility. I took the photo last month in clear sunset weather. (Here’s more of the story.)
Help me decide which photos to include in my book! If you have any favorites from my collection of Golden Gate photos that should definitely be in my book, or if you particularly despise one of my Golden Gate photos, please drop me a line and tell me.
The Waldo Tunnel guards the northern approach to the Golden Gate Bridge. From the mound hundreds of feet above the tunnel roof, lights of San Francisco spread out before me. It was not quite a digital night situation because of the strong ambient light from the city. The lighting on the roadways approaching the bridge cast a fiery glow, reminding me of this earlier image from Slacker Ridge (to the southwest of the current location, but in the fog).
For information about this location, see my story Alignment.
[33mm in 35mm terms, 180 seconds at f/9 and ISO 100, tripod mounted.]
On a balmy afternoon in late October I studied the topographic map of the USGS San Francisco North Quadrant. This map shows (among other areas) the hills above Fort Baker outside Sausalito, and the northern side of the Golden Gate Bridge.
It seemed to me that there was a ridge that could be climbed going up from above Fort Baker. You can tell on a topo map if something is steep when the contour lines on either side of the white space representing the ridge top are spaced close together. If the contour lines aren’t drawn too closely across the top itself, there’s a good chance you can get up.
My hope was to find a location across from the northern end of the Golden Gate Bridge so that I could shoot through both towers.
I picked up my friend Mark and we parked on Wolf Back Ridge Road, high above Sausalito. Technically, this is a private, no-trespassing area carved into the Marin Headlands section of the Golden Gate National Recreation Area.
We donned our hiking boots and backpacks, and scrambled down a steep hill to find the Coastal Trail. Heading south, we passed a high tension tower, and then trudged up the hill over the Waldo tunnel. From there, I could see a straight shot down the ridge I had observed on the topo quadrant map.
The ridge line ended on a rock platform. Yes, the towers of the bridge aligned perfectly from north to south. The setting sun lit the bridge from the west, and the waxing moon provided fill lighting from the other side.
I positioned my camera on the tripod, braced it with my camera backpack to keep it from vibrating in the wind, and exposed for thirty seconds. The time exposure turned the car headlights and tail lights into lines of light beneath the bridge in alignment.
[230mm in 35mm terms, 30 seconds at f/20 and ISO 100, tripod mounted.]
In a break in the early autumn rains, I headed for Indian Rock to photograph sunset. The sun glowed through the scudding clouds for a moment, and then a solid bank of gray quickly filled the sky.
[52.5mm in 35mm equivalent terms, 1/100 of a second at f/13 and ISO 100, tripod mounted.]
