Category Archives: San Francisco Area

A Walk on the Richmond-San Rafael Bridge

The Richmond-San Rafael Bridge, also officially the “John F. McCarthy Memorial Bridge,” opened in 1956, displacing the last car ferry across San Francisco Bay. Recently, a lane on the upper deck of the bridge was converted to pedestrian and bike use (more bike than hike, in my observation). This comes close to completing a trail network that can be used to circumnavigate the Bay.

Shadow Selfie © Harold Davis

Shadow Selfie © Harold Davis

On a startlingly bright recent late afternoon, I found a place to park in Port Richmond near the bridge access trail. It was little over a mile from there to actually being on the bridge. Most of this trail section was between the highway (Interstate 580) and the notorious Richmond Chevron refinery (hence the pipes photographed through a chain link fence with my iPhone shown below).

Pipes © Harold Davis

Pipes © Harold Davis

Once on the Bridge, it is a little more than five miles to Point San Quentin on the Marin side. I walked about half way, to the first cantilever. The shadows were growing long (see the first photo in this story!). Heading back to my parked car, I noted how much fun it was to explore some place new again with my camera, just like before the pandemic, even if the new location was close to home.

Also posted in Hiking, Photography

Under the Dumbarton Bridge

For reasons I won’t go into at this time, I find myself these days often driving south to Palo Alto on the peninsula. It’s about an hour from my home in Berkeley with no traffic, and hell-on-wheels when there is traffic. One of the routes I use crosses San Francisco Bay on the Dumbarton Bridge.

Dumbarton Bridge © Harold Davis

Dumbarton Bridge © Harold Davis

There’s something about photographing under bridges that floats my boat. Perhaps it is that salty, sensual melody from “Under the Boardwalk” rattling around in my neurons, and I’ve mistaken a bridge for a boardwalk. In any case, check out Under the Yaquina Bay Bridge and Bridge of Light for examples.

So I was pleased to learn that the underside of the Dumbarton Bridge is pretty cool. The image above is a quick photo from the eastern end, where I plan to photograph again when I have more time. You can click here for a view of the underneath of the western side.

Also posted in Monochrome, Photography

Under the Dumbarton Bridge

In 1982, a new Dumbarton Bridge replaced the old, cast-iron cantilevered span across San Francisco Bay from Hayward to Palo Alto. The hardest part of the construction was the giant cast iron footings deep down into the muck and mud of the Bay. This location was close to the first bridge crossing the Bay, an abandoned train bridge finished just after the great San Francisco earthquake of 1906.

Under the Dumbarton Bridge © Harold Davis

Under the Dumbarton Bridge © Harold Davis

Climbing down the side of the bridge to get under it reminded me a bit of an earlier adventure with Berkeley Municipal Pier. The footing was treacherous in stagnant salt water, mud, and detritus, and I made my way carefully around and through a bend in the dilapidated barbed-wire fencing. 

Once under the bridge, I found myself on a confronting the colossus of the cement footings of the bridge. These underpinnings were reflected in the inter-tidal zone mud flats. 

I put my camera (a Nikon D850) on the tripod and added a polarizing filter to amplify the reflections of the underbelly of the bridge. I made eight exposures using my 28-300mm Nikkor lens at 58mm. Each exposure was stopped down (at f/29) because I needed maximum depth-of-field to render sharply both the nearby reflections and the recession of pillars through the opening in the columns. The sensitivity was ISO 64. My exposure speeds were from 1/20 of a second to 6 seconds. 

I combined and processed the exposures using Adobe Bridge, Adobe Photoshop, Nik HDR Efex Pro, Nik Color Efex, Nik Silver Efex, Topaz Adjust, and Topaz Simplify.

I like to photograph the naked underbelly of bridges. Here’s another one of mine that has had considerable play: Under the Yaquina Bay Bridge.

Also posted in Monochrome

San Francisco Reflections

Wandering with a friend in downtown San Francisco last week, I was struck by all the new construction, and how much things have changed. Over the past half-dozen years I have mostly wandered more exotic paths—Son Doong Cave in Vietnam, the Kumano kodo in Japan, the Camino de Santiago, and more—and have seldom set foot in San Francisco.

The place has changed, almost beyond recognition. What struck me most in the area around Salesforce Tower is all the modern, reflective windows, which sometimes provide echoes of a distant and almost forgotten past, now alienated and completely separate from the present.

Rage Against the Grid © Harold Davis

Rage Against the Grid © Harold Davis (1 Sansome St)

Time Travel © Harold Davis

Time Travel © Harold Davis (1 Sansome St)

We cannot enclose the clouds © Harold Davis

We cannot enclose the clouds © Harold Davis (1 Sansome St)

What windows do we want? © Harold Davis

What windows do we want? © Harold Davis (45 Fremont St)

At the conclusion of our walk, we headed across the top of the Broadway Tunnel to Chinatown, which in contrast to the slicker downtown seems pretty much as it always was, a bustling enclave of tourists and Chinese-Americans doing their thing.

Here’s a “sort of take the photographer’s life in his hands” fisheye of the eastern mouth of the tunnel. You can see the light trail of a vehicle that was too close and too fast on the right of my position, and my companion as a kind of “ghost” on the left hand side of the image.

Broadway Tunnel © Harold Davis

Broadway Tunnel © Harold Davis

Also posted in Photography

Marin Coast with old gun emplacement

The Marin Coast is astoundingly beautiful for being so near a major city (San Francisco). We are lucky that much of it remains undeveloped, and that environmentalists won the battles of the 1960s that would have turned it into subdivisions, shopping malls, and four-leaf clover overpasses. In my experience, this is one of the most remarkable coastlines anywhere in the world.

Marin Coast with old gun emplacement © Harold Davis

The photo is looking north up the Marin Headlands at sunset. In the foreground it shows and old pillbox and gun emplacement, dating from the World War II era when a Japanese invasion was feared. When the military pulled out of the area, they didn’t do a very good job of cleaning up, and structures like this one can be found dotting the Headlands.

From this location, facing south instead of north, one can see Point Bonita and its lighthouse.

Also posted in Landscape

Point Bonita

At dusk the outer cliffs of the Headlands become shrouded in mystery. Point Bonita Lighthouse guards the approach to the Golden Gate, as it has since the days of steamships. A formidable approach indeed, who is to know from the rugged coast that the way is open to a vast inland bay?

Point Bonita in Black and White © Harold Davis

Point Bonita Lighthouse © Harold Davis

Also posted in Landscape, Monochrome, Photography

San Francisco Sunset from Port Oakland

Yesterday I hosted a Meetup primarily to provide a forum for Rafael of PhotoPills to explain the PhotoPills planning software to interested photographers, and also for the fun of hanging out with fellow photographers. There were old friends and new friends, but first we almost ended before we began, as the original location at Middleshore Park in Oakland was usurped by a concert. Quick on our feet, we changed the location to Port View Park, a short distance away, where we socialized on a pier, listened to Rafael, and photographed the spectacular sunset.

San Francisco Sunset © Harold Davis

Image above: three combined exposures, each exposure at 78mm, f/7.1, and ISO 64, tripod mounted; exposure times 2.5 seconds, 5 seconds, and 8 seconds. Image below: photographed at 300mm, handheld, 1/8000 of a second at f/5.6 and ISO 200.

San Francisco Sunset from Port Oakland © Harold Davis

Bay Bridge

This is an iPhone photo from Treasure Island over the Bay Bridge towards San Francisco, taken during my recent (very much fun) San Francisco in Black & White extended field workshop!

Bay Bridge © Harold Davis

Also posted in iPhone, Monochrome, Photography

Space available in the Sept 16-17 San Francisco Black & White workshop

We have space available in our Black & White in San Francisco Weekend workshop coming up next month September 16-17, 2017. San Francisco is a great place for photography, and a great locale to “think” in black and white!

Farther Shore © Harold Davis

Workshop Description: This workshop includes field photography in several Bay area locations, monochromatic shooting techniques in the field, black & white conversion in Photoshop, Nik Silver Efex, and other plug-ins, and monochromatic processing. Emphasis will be on thinking creatively in black and white in the field, and fully understanding the myriad possibilities in post-production.

Sunset on the Bay © Harold Davis

More info and registration: https://www.meetup.com/Harold-Davis/events/237226290/

Pop-Up Workshop: Note that if this workshop stays small (less than eight participants) I will conduct it as a pop-up workshop on-the-fly (rather than classroom based) which will give opportunities for more field locations, and more one-on-one interaction.

Noir City Dreams © Harold Davis

 

San Francisco Moonrise © Harold Davis

Also posted in Monochrome, Workshops

Workshop in a Suitcase

I am used to leading two kinds of photography workshops: one is close enough to my home base in Berkeley so it is easy to set up the workshop room in advance, the other is under the auspices of an institution where I am not responsible for setup. Last weekend’s Black and White in San Francisco workshop was a hybrid, in other words a kind of cross between the two.

Golden Gate Splash © Harold Davis

Golden Gate Splash © Harold Davis

We rented a really very nice space in the heart of San Francisco’s Chinatown as the home base for the event. This turned out to be a great idea, but there was really no way we could setup in advance. In thinking how I could get everything I needed over to the workshop from the parking garage, I hit on the idea of encapsulating it in the suitcase I use traveling. This led to the workshop in a suitcase, possibly a relative of the great monologist Spalding Gray’s Monster in a Box.

Farther Shore © Harold Davis

Farther Shore © Harold Davis

Thanks to the participants in this workshop for being a great and game group despite the rain in Saturday. We had fun in a variety of locations. I photographed the Golden Gate Bridge and Fort Point (top) and Baker and China Beaches from Fort Point (above) in foul weather on Saturday, and used the images in classroom black and white conversion demos.

Rome from St Peter's Dome © Harold Davis

Rome from St Peter’s Dome © Harold Davis

The sepia image of the eternal city (Rome) shown above was a classroom demonstration, with the file drawn from my recent trip to Italy. The box of prints shown below was contained as part of my monster, er, workshop in a suitcase. This was a great workshop and location. We will probably but it on rotation for a repeat sometime in the next 12-18 months, and you might not want to miss it both in terms of the photography and the hands-on demos of monochromatic conversion techniques. You can keep tabs on my workshop schedule by visiting my Workshops & Events page.

Prints in a Box © Harold Davis

Prints in a Box © Harold Davis

Also posted in Monochrome, Workshops

San Francisco and all that Jazz!

This is an in-camera multiple exposure from Battery Spencer of the Golden Gate Bridge. There were five exposures overall. Each exposure was five seconds in duration. For the first three exposures I left the camera on the tripod, and panned between the exposures slightly from left to right. For the last two exposures, I took the camera off tripod and wiggled it quickly and slightly in my hands. Using the Autogain setting made sure that the five exposures were balanced, and that nothing predominated.

San Francisaco and all that Jazz © Harold Davis

San Francisaco and all that Jazz © Harold Davis

Also posted in Photography

Steep Ravine

The past several years during the great California drought the waterfalls on the slopes of Mount Tamalpais have been fairly dry, even in the rainy season. So what a wonderful joy to hike up the Steep Ravine trail yesterday on the western slope of Mt Tam in a break in the El Nino wet weather to see the torrents flowing down the mountain’s flanks!

Steep Ravine © Harold Davis

Steep Ravine © Harold Davis

Special thanks to my friend Mark, who put up with me, my camera, and tripod along the muddy trail.

Oakland 16th Street Station

The Oakland 16th Street Station, also called the Central Oakland Station, was built in the early 1900s as a grand terminus for the Southern Pacific Railway. In service until 1994, the station also served as a transportation hub, connecting the local East Bay Electric Railway and Amtrak with the Southern Pacific.

Hall of Shadows © Harold Davis

Hall of Shadows © Harold Davis

Taken out of service in 1994, the station is now disconnected from all train tracks, fenced, and locked. A local not-for-profit development corporation has owned the station since its closure. Located in what has become a mixed neighborhood with light industry, single-room residence hotels, ad-hoc homeless villages of shopping carts and makeshift tents, neighborhood vegetable gardens, and fancy gated condo communities, in the shadow of the highway maze surrounding the approaches to the San Francisco Bay Bridge, the future of this historic structure is unclear. Currently, it is sporadically rented as a movie set, for parties (there has been at least one wedding here), and to groups of roving photographers.

Bench for Waiting © Harold Davis

Bench for Waiting © Harold Davis

Late in the afternoon I joined a small group of co-conspirators who arranged for legitimate access to the site. Meeting at the gate to the property, we were locked in by the somewhat grumpy caretaker, who planned to release us four hours later. It turned out he was a pussy cat when he came to let us out, and genuinely concerned and excited about the history and preservation of the structure.

Before daylight faded we photographed in the main waiting area, on the train platforms that lead to nowhere, and in the arcades below the tracks.

Dinosaur Climbing Stair © Harold Davis

Dinosaur Climbing Stair © Harold Davis

About the images: The top image, Hall of Shadows, combines two photos, each shot with my Zeiss 15mm f/2.8 wide-angle lens with the camera on a tripod at f/10 and ISO 200. A darker photo was made using a 30 second exposure time, and a lighter one was made at 60 seconds.

One of my co-conspirators brought a self-powered 600 watt strobe. In the first, darker image he fired it just outside the door, and also from the outside of the windows. In the longer, lighter exposure he illuminated the whole room, using sequential light bursts.

I visualized this incredible room with its ghosts of the past as a dim, shadowy place. My idea was that the details should not be entirely clear because of the darkness. People passed through this station, living their lives, having love affairs, taking the train to go to war or to different destinies. All these lives haunt the 16th Street Station, and now they are passing into obscurity.

To capture this idea, I started with the first, dark exposure, then gradually painted in some areas of light and shadow from the brighter image. I took great care not to reveal too much, and to leave the image low-key and mysterious.

Bench for Waiting was photographed while there was still a little afternoon light in the waiting hall. It’s a straightforward monochromatic HDR image, shot on the tripod at 28mm, with three exposures ranging from 5 seconds to 30 seconds, each exposure at f/22 and ISO 200. This bench is pretty amazing, sitting there placidly, with the decaying plaster walls of the monumental space behind it.

The compositional trick was to align my camera at a height to as nearly as possible approach the bench in a completely perpendicular fashion. The point of this was camera position was to minimize perspective distortion, and was harder to accomplish than one might think in the dim light.

End of the Line and Dinosaur Climbing Stairs were photographed in the arcade beneath the tracks. I used multi-image bracketing to render them colorful, and to extend the dynamic range of each image.

End of the Line © Harold Davis

End of the Line © Harold Davis

Special thanks to those who organized and participated in this fun and exciting photographic event (you know who you are!).

Also posted in Monochrome

San Francisco Dreams in Black and White

San Francisco dreams in black and white. Please come visit my new virtual gallery of San Francisco in Black and White!

Noir City Dreams  © Harold Davis

Noir City Dreams © Harold Davis

What goes on behind the shades in the lit window of an anonymous apartment in the big city? Meanwhile, the moon rises over the proverbial skyline.

San Francisco Moonrise © Harold Davis

San Francisco Moonrise © Harold Davis

And the sun sets on a day of low tides behind the Golden Gate…

Sunset at Minus Tide © Harold Davis

Sunset at Minus Tide © Harold Davis

Also posted in Digital Night, Monochrome

New span of the Bay Bridge

When the new Sheriff comes riding into town, everyone needs to adjust. The same thing is true for photographers when a new public structure goes up, particularly when the change is striking and vast enough, like it or not, to totally change the landscape. When this kind of change happens we must assess the alteration to our familiar landscape, and seek out new vantage points to include the new element in our photographs.

New Span of the Bay Bridge © Harold Davis

New Span of the Bay Bridge © Harold Davis

The new span of the San Francisco Bay Bridge, from Yerba Buena Island to Emeryville and Oakland on the East Bay side, is this kind of change. Driving across the new bridge is a compelling experience, with the structured and regular lighting, and a mostly open feeling. In comparison, the old 1930s bridge was a bit closed-in, and far less expansive feeling.

Walking the new bridge is exciting, although the walk is mostly in the shadow of the old structure (the old roadway is shown in this linked story). With the last of the old bridge scheduled to come in staged demolition, the walkway will eventually no longer be dominated by the shadow of the past.

But none of this prepares one for the impact and resonance of the tower of the new Bay Bridge, which can be photographed from a variety of interesting locations around San Francisco Bay. I made the image shown in this story while leading a night photography workshop from Treasure Island, just across the small isthmus that connects Treasure Island with Yerba Buena Island.

Old and new  © Harold Davis

Old and new © Harold Davis

Related stories: Out with the OldBay Bridge Lights. For a pattern I observed on the new Bay Bridge walkway, see Broken Arrow.

Also posted in Photography