Photoblog 2.0

City Lights, photo by Harold Davis. View this image larger.

This is a long exposure (120 seconds) with my 10.5mm digital fisheye lens photographed into night. Standing on my aerie, I pointed the camera in the opposite direction from Tennessee Beach Sunset.

In the photo, you are looking south. You can see the cliffs of the Marin Headlands, then the gap made by the Golden Gate, followed by the lights of south San Francisco. Airplanes and a ship have turned into trails of light due to the time exposure.

As I’ve said before, I think there is something very eerie about standing on an aerie in the dark wilderness photographing the lights of the city.

Mount Tamalpais, photo by Harold Davis. View this image larger.

With the shutter open for five minutes, my sensor picks up all kinds of ambient light on the slopes of Mount Tamalpais. Cars snaking their way up and down Panoramic Highway, houses on the ridge leading up to the peak, a red light on the summit, and the glow of ambient light from Mill Valley and other Marin cities reflecting on the mountain.

How different the landscape looks under the daytime sun.

Related stories: Mount Tamalpais from Euclid Avenue; Maserati and Mount Diablo; Digital Darkness; On Night Photography.

Marin Night, photo by Harold Davis. View this image larger.

This is a time exposure straight into full night. The photo was taken from a little hillock beside the Panaromic Highway facing the hills of Marin Headlands and looking back towards San Francisco. The sliver moon had just set, and it was really pretty dark. I had the camera with a fully open lens, and exposed for five minutes.

The glow in the sky doesn’t come from the setting sun (the sun would have to set in the southeast!). This is ambient light from San Francisco.

Approaching the Bridge, photo by Harold Davis. View this image larger.

This was the first exposure I took looking back at the Golden Gate Bridge from the Coastal Trail. I was standing in near darkness, to the north of the approach to the bridge.

I exposed the image for thirty seconds, and when I looked at it large on my computer I was pleased to see the way the airplane trail in the sky seems to echo the curve of the road with its trail of car lights.

Related stories: Golden Gate at Night; Two Towers; S-Curve; Gerbode Valley.

Two Towers, photo by Harold Davis. View this image larger.

This is a twenty second time exposure of the south tower of the Golden Gate Bridge. You can see the communications tower on Twin Peaks behind and to the left of the Golden Gate tower.

Taken with a telephoto lens (the 150mm focal length I used translates to 225mm in 35mm terms), the hilly terrain of San Francisco appears compressed.

I was positioned a couple of miles up the Coastal Trail, looking back at the Golden Gate Bridge. The bridge tower is framed by the ridges of the Marin Headlands.

Related stories: Gerbode Valley; S-Curve.

Slacker Ridge, photo by Harold Davis. View this image larger.

This is a three minute time exposure with the lens wide open. Mostly I was photographing the fog and Golden Gate bridge, but for this exposure I turned my camera around on the tripod and pointed it northwest towards the summit of the Slacker Ridge. The ambient light from the bridge and San Francisco is illuminating the brown grass leading up to the ridge, and providing the glow in the sky towards the right (eastwards, towards the Bay) of the photo.

This steep hill sits in the Marin Headlands overlooking the Golden Gate Bridge and San Francisco. Based on the signs I saw, I think Slacker Ridge is home to a mountain lion, lonely lord on the border of city and wild.

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

This is a two minute time exposure of the Golden Gate and San Francisco, taken at night in cold and foggy conditions, from the rather oddly named Slacker Ridge (one of the high points in the Marin Headlands directly above the Golden Gate Bridge).

On Monday night Mark and I had gone hiking on the Coastal Trail high above the 101 Freeway. We reached a ridge that looked towards Gerbode Valley in one direction and back at the Golden Gate Bridge in the other. It may help you to picture the spot to think that we were above and to the west of the Waldo Tunnel, what my family calls the “Rainbow Tunnel.” You go through this tunnel just before you cross the Golden Gate Bridge to reach San Francisco.

Monday was balmy, and as we returned to the car through the almost tropical night I kept looking with longing at the dark heights above us. Clearly, I am becoming obsessed with night photography.

Looking at the Park Service Marin Headlands trail map, I could see that the Coastal Trail made its way around these heights (which were unnamed on the map) to met McCollough Road. The AAA Sausalito-Mill Valley map had a little more detail, and showed a spur trail going up the back of the heights (also unamed on the AAA map) not far from the junction with McCollough Road.

Last night, I decided to try my luck. The evening was variable with some wind and fog, and I figured I’d either face a white-out or maybe get some interesting photos. One of the appeals of night photography, of course, is that you just never know.

I dressed warmly, in woolies top and bottom, a polypro vest, and a down jacket. There was room for my headlamp under my Patagonia balaclava.

It was easy to find the side trail marked on the map. In the physical world, the heights were named on a Park Service sign. As I’ve mentioned, the name was somewhat odd: Slacker Ridge. I didn’t feel like a slacker having marched up there in the gathering night with my camera gear and tripod in my bag on my back, and with the wind and fog from the Pacific getting my clothes and camera gear damp.

The weather may have been chill, but the photo looks warm to me with the drifting fog illuminating the scene unpredictably as the fog moved across the area being captured by the long exposure.

S-Curve, photo by Harold Davis. View this image larger.

Behind us, the coyotes sang their eerie song and the stars twinkled over Gerbode Valley. In front, the lights of San Francisco and the approach to the Golden Gate Bridge made a vivid light show.

In this image, I held the shutter open for a minute to turn the motion of the cars into solid streaks of yellow and red light. I also underexposed by a couple of stops at f/11 to allow the background to go black while making the colors of the cars in motion more vivid.

When I saw the image in the Light Table mode of Adobe Bridge, the world was indeed abstracted out of the photo. All I saw was the S-shaped curve made by the car lights. Perhaps a little like the curve one should aim for in Photoshop when editing the Luminosity channel of a photograph in LAB color mode.

Peeking Bridge, photo by Harold Davis. View this image larger.

OK, so this is the Golden Gate Bridge peeking, not a Peking Duck. A cheap shot, I know, but I have a weakness for puns. Also, I’ve been losing weight lately, which tends to make me think of everything in the context of food.

This view is from Coyote Ridge, looking across Tennessee Valley, with the Old Springs Trail passing through a gap in Wolf Ridge and continuing as the Miwok Trail.

The Marin Headlands is amazing as a wilderness so close to San Francisco. As I’ve commented before, I feel more alone (and more at risk) in a wilderness where you can view civilization than a wilderness where, well, there is only wilderness surrounding.

Related story: Pirate’s Cove and Marin Headlands.
Related link: Park service trail map of the Marin Headlands.

Sausalito at Twilight, photo by Harold Davis. View this image larger.

This is a photograph of Sausalito and Tiburon from across the Bay as night came on. It is a view of scenic and almost Mediterranean Sausalito that a tourist probably wouldn’t see.

I took the photo from the top of Wildcat Peak, using a telephoto lens, and a thirty second exposure with the lens wide open.

As usual with this kind of long exposure in low light conditions, the digital sensor picked up colors that I didn’t even know were there, like the sunset reflecting off the mist on the water in the bottom left of the photo.

Pirate’s Cove and Marin Headlands, photo by Harold Davis. View this image larger.

Mark and I left the car where the Miwok Trail crosses Route 1. We climbed the Miwok Trail, glancing at wide vistas of the suburban sprawl of Marin County. From the top, there was a wide and serene view in all directions, with the top of the Golden Gate Bridge popping up through a notch in the hills on the south side of Tennessee Valley.

We wandered down Coyote Ridge, and followed the Coastal Fire Road to its southern junction with the Pacific Coastal Trail. From the junction, we turned north on the Coastal Trail, and followed it up, down, and around for a series of spectacular views of ocean and the hills of the Marin Headlands.

Taking our time, we stopped to photograph turkey vultures, lupine, and textures in the grass. We examined what may have been mountain lion scat. We took a side scramble down to the wild beach at Pirate’s Cove.

By the time we reached the cliffs on the south side of Muir Beach, the sun was quickly setting and the world was getting dark.

Looking back along the coast at Pirate’s Cove and beyond, I exposed this image with my camera on a tripod, holding the shutter open for thirty seconds. There was a light fog coming in off the sea. The long exposure picked up colors in the headland cliffs, mist, and fog not visible to our naked eyes.

If you look closely at the photo, you can see the light from the Point Bonita lighthouse, as well as some of the lights of South San Francisco.

A little footsore, we trudged down to the Pelican Inn in the dark. At 9PM, the restaurant was just closing. Amy picked us up, we had stew and sandwiches at Mark and Amy’s house, then I drove to my home across the Bay.

Related links: Park service trail map of the Marin Headlands.

Bridge Light, photo by Harold Davis. View this image larger.

This was the last exposure of a very long day (see Hiding, Pacific Golden-Plovers, Alone in the City, and Bridge Time). I pointed the camera straight down on the cove directly to the northwest of the Golden Gate Bridge. I opened the shutter for three minutes, with the lens wide open.

Neat the way the light in the photo comes from the Golden Gate Bridge, but the bridge is never actually seen (you see the bridge shadow, of course).

Bridge Time, photo by Harold Davis. View this image larger.

Coming up the trail from Kirby Cove, it was fully night. Not a pitch black night, because there was a sliver moon and light pollution from the bridge and city. But as dark as it was going to get.

Up on the fortifications of the Marin Headlands, I decided to see how long a time exposure I could make of the Golden Gate Bridge.

First I did some tests at 30 seconds to get the exposure right. My plan was to multiply out the exposure time once I had the right f/stop at this shutter speed (the maximum I can set on my Nikon D200 before going to Bulb). Based on what I was seeing in the LCD after exposure, 30 seconds and f/5.0 seemed about right.

Based on the 30 second exposure, I calculated that at f/22, the most stopped-down (smallest opening) of the lens I was using, 8 minutes would be about right.

Next I set the D200 to Bulb, which means the shutter will stay open as long as it is depressed. Since I really didn’t want to physically hold the shutter open for 8 minutes, I used the programmable Nikon MC-36 remote release.

It’s not too hard to set the MC-36 to whatever shutter time you’d like with the D200 on Bulb, although you need to remember to set Long to the time rather than Interval (it turns out that Interval means the time between multiple programmed exposures rather than the interval length of an exposure). Even though the MC-36 has a dim backlight, a headlamp really comes in handy for making settings in the dark.

I think the exposure as it came out is pretty interesting. A couple of things are worth noting. For some reason the camera’s EXIF data for the image shows an exposure of 479 seconds, one second shy of the 8 minutes I set using the control. Perhaps this is a round-off issue.

Also, you better have a great deal of patience for this kind of exposure, particualrly in cold and dark conditions. I’m using fast Sandisk Extreme III memory cards. Even so, each exposure took roughly 50% of the time the shutter speed time for writing to the card before I could use the camera again. This meant at least 12 minutes of standing around in the cold and dark for each exposure!

Kirby Cove, photo by Harold Davis. View this image larger.

After a fun, but long, day photographing at Duxbury Reef and Bolinas with Mark, we went our separate ways. In the cool of the early evening, I decided to hike down to Kirby Cove.

As I followed the trail down and around the curve of the hill I was alone, buffered from the road and the tourists above in the Marin Headlands. It was shaded, and sunset was near. I felt like I had passed out of the normal paths of civilization.

Alone on the beach, I watched the sunset and the lights of the bridge and city come on. I set my tripod in the intertidal zone, and did a two second time exposure, grabbing the tripod back to safety before it could be tossed by a wave.

Watching the lights come on, I decided one is most alone in the city. In the wilderness when I am alone I usually feel exalted and special, but not lonely. When I am photographing at night from a wild place near the city, distant activity and light pollution makes me feel apart, and maybe even lonely, an outsider looking in.

San Pablo Bay from Wildcat Peak, photo by Harold Davis. View this image larger.

San Pablo Bay is the upper part of San Francisco Bay, to the northeast of the Golden Gate. Beyond San Pablo Bay, if you were a ship you could make your way through the Carquinez Strait into Suisan Bay and the maze of the Sacramento River delta.

On Tuesday we were picking up the kids at around 5:30PM from their pre-school, Step One, which sits high up in the Berkeley hills. Phyllis and I looked at striations in the sky, and figured that the sunet might be memorable. I decided to head for Wildcat Peak, which is the highest peak in the Bay area that can’t be reached by road.

I packed my bag, Phyllis made me a sandwich to go, and I was at the trailhead at Inspiration Point in Tilden Park by about 6:15. Wildcat Peak is only a couple of miles, and I was there in plenty of time for sunset.

The really spectacular views from Wildcat are west towards San Francisco, the Golden Gate, Mount Tamalpais, and beyond. There’s also a nice view of Mount Diablo.

As night came on dark and inky in the upper sky, I was struck by the wrap-around effect as the coastal range in Tilden Park topographically stepped down to San Pablo Bay.

This was a one minute exposure with my lens wide open.

Related story: Night for Day.