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

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.

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

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

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

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

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