Photoblog 2.0

Blowing in the Golden Gate, photo by Harold Davis. View this image larger.

When the clouds blow in the Golden Gate (which is often) and when there’s also a blue sky over the Bay (which is sometimes), then there will be a spectacular show at sunset.

To witness yesterday’s show, I started at the Inspiration Point parking lot at about 5PM and hiked to Wildcat Peak. I had a book with me, and read for a while until the performance started to move quickly. Within minutes after this shot, the sun had set and the Golden Gate was hidden in an inpenetrable layer of fog.

[130mm, 195mm in 35mm equivalent terms, 1/320 of a second at f/9 and ISO 100, handheld.]

Wave Game, photo by Harold Davis. View this image larger.

I played a game with the waves on Stinson Beach. I positioned my tripod below the tide line and tried to capture the movement of the waves. The waves tried to make me grab camera and tripod and run from the spot.

A great way to start thinking about vacation.

Related stories: Wave Toss, Surf.

Moon over Bolinas, photo by Harold Davis. View this image larger.

Returning home after an afternoon hike in Steep Ravine followed by dinner and sunset photography on Stinson Beach, Mark and I stopped beside the road between Stinson Beach and Muir Beach. The crescent moon was headed down into a cloud bank, and I raced the descent of the moon as I assembled my camera and tripod in the dusk. The photograph shows the tip of the Bolinas peninsula and Duxbury Reef gleaming in the moonlight.

[200mm, 300mm in 35mm equivalent terms, 13 seconds at f/5.6 and ISO 100, tripod mounted.]

Persistence of Vision, photo by Harold Davis. View this image larger.

This is a photo from the end of the Berkeley Pier looking towards the Golden Gate Bridge. The Berkeley pier seems like it goes half way across San Francisco Bay to Alcatraz, but at one time it must have stretched futher than it does now. The boards block the end of the pier, prevent people from falling into the water, and make a good canvas for graffitists.

When taking the photo, I positioned myself well back from the boards at the end of the pier, used a moderately telephoto lens, a decently long exposure, and stopped the lens down as far as possible. The point of these choices was to maximize depth-of-field and get boards and the Golden Gate Bridge in focus (with the partially blurred water a bonus). [62mm focal length for 93mm equivalence in 35mm terms, 3/5 of a second at f/32, tripod mounted.]

I exposed the original RAW capture for the Golden Gate Bridge, which meant that the boards in the foreground of the photo appeared very dark and underexposed. To correct this problem, and bring out the wonderful glowing colors on these boards, I needed to do a second pass at the RAW original, correcting the exposure values with the boards in mind.

The two versions, one corrected for the Golden Gate Bridge, sky, and water and the other using exposure settings for the boards needed to be combined as layers using a mask. If I’d applied the light exposure values I used on the boards to the bridge, the bridge would have been overexposed, so the point of the mask was to selectively apply the exposure values.

I was able to create an appropriate mask by converting a duplicate of the darker version of the image to LAB color. Next, I dropped the A and B channels of the image, leaving just the luminosity information. I used an adjustment curve to heighten the contrast, and converted the image to grayscale. I used Photoshop’s Image > Apply Image command to use this black-and-white version, which showed the boards as black shapes and everything else as white, in my original, layered image. A little hand painting on the mask finished the job.

Here’s why the process I used to create this image from a single RAW photo is not exactly High Dynamic Range (HDR) photography.

Diffusion of the Moon, photo by Harold Davis. View this image larger.

Only a fifteen second exposure, with more light than you’d expect: the bank of clouds surrounding the moon acting like a giant source of diffusion lighting.

Related stories: Multi-RAW Processing versus automated HDR, Taming Extravagant Dynamic Range, Golden Gate Moonrise.

Mt Tamalpais from Berkeley Marina, photo by Harold Davis. View this image larger.

We left the Berkeley Pier and I drove down to the breakwater in front of the channel leading to the Berkeley marina. In this twenty second exposure, I was pleased to capture the moon along side Mount Tamalpais, and a red sail gliding by in the dusk.

Golden Gate from Berkeley Pier, photo by Harold Davis. View this image larger.

I celebrated Julian’s 10th birthday a bit early yesterday with Julian and his grandparents (they won’t be around on his actual birthday). We had a very nice dinner at Skates (for his desert, Julian had Chocolate Decadence cake with a candle). Then we walked out on the Berkeley Pier.

I exposed this image for 25 seconds so I could stop the lens down as far as possible (to f/25). My idea was to get the Golden Gate Bridge in focus at infinity, using the high depth-of-field to also maintain clarity in the pier’s wood railing.

Golden Gate Bridge from Fort Baker, photo by Harold Davis. View this image larger.

The evening looked to have some fog over the Golden Gate, but I decided to try my luck. I grabbed a quick take-out burger, ate it at the trailhead, slung my pack on, and set off up the Coastal Trail behind the bridge.

Slacker Ridge was covered in fog. Down around the other side of the headlands, the ridge line above the Waldo Tunnel saw cold air blowing hard across, pushing the fog line. At first I though there was a chance for a photo, but pretty soon I felt like an arctic explorer in my down jacket and balaclava. Pretty silly a couple of miles from San Francisco. But then, you know what Mark Twain is supposed to have said about summer in San Francisco.

The bridge was pretty much buried in fog, and it was getting darker. Then I got a bright idea. I looked down at Fort Baker in Sausalito. It was still clear of the clouds.

I headed back along the trail and up and over to my car, shed my hiking boots, and drove down to the Fort Baker waterfront. On an abandoned road that crumbled to an end above the sea, in the gathering darkness, I exposed this image of the bridge against the fog, with the lights of Seacliff behind. It was pretty dark, and it took a thirty second wide-open exposure to capture the detail and blue sky shown in this image. A couple of seconds later the cloud cover was across, and the world had gone to black.

Golden Gate Moonrise, photo by Harold Davis. View this image larger.

As the full moon rose behind the Golden Gate, I quit trying to photograph the moon beneath the bridge. The broader context of the landscape showed the beach at Kirby Cove with a hint of the surf flattened by the time exposure and the skyline of San Francisco in the distance.

This six second exposure was the shortest exposure I made in the sequence of photos I took from the fortifications just behind the beach. The moon itself is still blown out at six seconds, but the general landscape is pleasing.

Related stories: Moon Shines Bright; Towers of the Moon; Rose Moon Rising. To learn more about exposing landscapes that are lit by a bright moon, check out Taming Extravagant Dynamic Range on the O’Reilly Digital Media blog.

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Moon Shines Bright, photo by Harold Davis. View this image larger.

On Saturday I knew the full rose moon was coming up at 9:29PM. I decided to try for some photographs of the moon rising from below the Golden Gate Bridge, so I headed for Kirby Cove. The beach at Kirby Cove faces the channel of the Golden Gate on the north shore, with the bridge to the east. My thinking was that I would be in a good position for the moon and bridge.

At about 8:30PM in the gathering dusk I headed down the trail for Kirby Cove, and by a few minutes after nine I was in position. The moon came up right on schedule. I made this exposure with the shutter open for 10 seconds (ISO 100, f/5.6), with the moving lights of the small cruise ship centered under the moon an unexpected bonus.

Looking at the lights of the bridge, city, and cruise ship you can figure out that the photo must have been taken in the dusk. If it had been the sun, there would have been more ambient light. So this is the moon, not the sun. But this moon shines bright. This moon shines bright as the sun.

Tower of the Moon 2, photo by Harold Davis. View this image larger.

As the rose moon rose, it lost its rose coloration, but lined up nicely with the south tower of the Golden Gate Bridge. Top exposure at 1.6 seconds and f/5.6, bottom at 1/13 second and f/8, both at ISO 100.

Related story: Rose Moon Rising.

View this image larger.

Rose Moon Rising, photo by Harold Davis. View this image larger.

Full summer moons toward the end of June are sometimes called “rose moons,” and this one lives up to the name.

Last night, Phyllis and I parked the kids at a pizza and movie party given at Nicky and Mathew’s pre-school. Then we picked up sandwiches and headed for the Marin Headlands side of the Golden Gate.

The fog coming and going was beautiful, and the rose moon rising was icing on the cake (to badly mix my metaphors). For me, this was a bus person’s holiday, to throw more metaphors into the stew. But it was great having Phyllis along, and she enjoyed the show of light and air in the Golden Gate. And, as Phyllis said, she enjoyed the fog horns tuned to a fifth interval apart on a diatonic scale, pleasing to Western ears.

Golden Gate in Summer, photo by Harold Davis. View this image larger.

A great bank of fog has covered the Bay area, so it’s a little hard to remember that this past week was summer. It was hot for around here, at least 85 degrees in Berkeley.

On Wednesday, Julian (shown below) had no school, and I took him out to Point Reyes where it was much cooler. We hiked down to Marshall Beach, built a sand castle, hiked back up, then drove over to Drakes Beach and climbed up the bluffs.

Julian was really respectful of the drop to the beach below. He said, “Dad, if someone fell off, they would die, right?”

Right. Good to hear caution from the boy who lived.

We drove back to Berkeley and took a swim at Julian’s grandparents.

By now it was late and Julian was very ready for dinner and bed. But the sun had set and turned the world pink with the haze of summer. I drove up to the parking lot beside the Lawrence Hall of Science, pulled out my tripod, and snapped this twenty-five second time exposure of the Golden Gate in summer.

Dear reader: I’m off this week to Yosemite to photograph digital night in the mountains, so most likely no blog stories until I get back.

Silicon Valley from Mission Peak, photo by Harold Davis. View this image larger.

This is a thirty second time exposure from the top of Mission Peak. It is looking down the slopes of Mission Peak across Fremont and the San Francisco Bay straight at Palo Alto and Mountain View. You can see the same clouds in an earlier exposure from the same series, focused to the south on San Jose.

If Silicon Valley is the beast, then this is an image of the belly of the beast. (Mission Peak has also been described as a beast, meaning that it is a tough hike.)

I’m ambivalent about Silicon Valley. On the one hand, I have to admire the gusto and inventivity that has sprung from the Silicon Valleys of the world. On the other hand I’ve spent a bit too much of my life working on pointless projects with bloated code and following irrational change control procedures.

You also have to admit there is something ugly about a culture that turns ranch land to a car culture wasteland of high-tech industrial parks and McMansions.

But I rant. I rave! The beast is indeed ugly, but it has beauty too. There’s beauty in the belly of the beast. And that’s what this photo means to me.

Related stories: Improv on Mission Peak; Above the Urban Sprawl; Mount Tamalpais from Mission Peak; Do You Know the Way?.

Eucalyptus Grove in the Fog, photo by Harold Davis. View this image larger.

We’ve been living under a cloud cover in the San Francisco Bay area for the last week, sometimes high clouds, sometimes low fog, sometimes bright, sometimes not, but always grey. Since the weather around here is generally wonderful, I’ve no right to complain. But it does make night photography kind of questionable.

Yesterday Mark was over in East Bay on business, and I thought it would be nice to show him Wildcat Peak in Tilden Park, since we’ve done so much walking around the Marin Headlands in his “back yard.”

After dinner, we set off from Inspiration Point. Normally, there’s a panoramic view from Wildcat of the Golden Gate, San Pablo Bay, Mount Diablo, Tamalpais, and more. But last night everything was socked in with a thick wall of fog. It was chilly, in the low forties, and a stiff wind blew. We didn’t linger on the summit.

Coming down from Wildcat Peak past the Memorial Grove, I stopped along Nimitz Way in the Eucalyptus grove. The trees were creaking and groaning in the wind. In the background, there was a bright white light, possibly the moon coming through the clouds.

Using my 12-24mm wide-angle lens, I placed my camera on my tripod and exposed this image for 80 seconds. Long enough to capture the trees in the dim light, and to let the moving branches turn kind of “liquid” as they moved in the foggy time exposure.