HDR Photography
I recently moved into a new office with a huge, boring, blank wall totally ready for a huge, interesting, dramatic landscape. That naturally meant returning to one of my favorite land/cityscapes, this view of Oakland, Berkeley, San Francisco, and Marin from sabbatical in 2017. For an image I expect to stare at for years to come, I really pulled out the stops in terms of producing the best possible image. Click through to Flickr to zoom in and get all of the details!
A post came on social media from more than 11 years ago reminded me of trips around the Bay Area; comparing my RAW files with the images I ultimately posted to Decaseconds originally left me asking, “How did I miss these?”
In past cases of reprocessing pictures, I took another approach to images I already knew were solid. This first image today, boat sailing near Point Bonita lighthouse north of San Francisco, is in a whole different category: I hadn’t remember that I’d taken the image at all.
The occasion was a trip to the Legion of Honor and Lincoln Park. Back then, not a single picture made it to Decaseconds. Many of the images from that day suffered from issues that I know how to correct now, but didn’t yet have the tools to conquer in early 2012.
These pictures from a trip to Treasure Island to shoot the San Francisco skyline are likewise mystifying. I posted only a single picture from that trip.
The old and new spans of the Bay Bridge, side-by-side, is a literally now-unseeable image.
Though a lot of posts came of our trip to the Marin Headlands to shoot the Golden Gate Bridge, this more natural shot of the rocky coastline (those little black dots are sea birds) has its own kind of large-scale glory.
Of course, a trip back through my photography in the Bay Area wouldn’t be complete without a shot of the Golden Gate Bridge that I previously ignored.
I posit that, from a certain point of view, life gets no better than hanging out on a sailboat on a Friday afternoon in the June sunshine. Not in reality, of course—there are lots of ways to enjoy life—but the version of the experience in my mind is just unbeatable.
My favorite view, run through my new favorite tool: Photoshop’s Super Resolution algorithm. My six-year-old laptop chugs a bit when running it, but the results are worth it; I recommend clicking through to see the detail in Berkeley’s South Campus.
Far beyond the glowing web of Bay Area streets, the verdant Berkeley Hills are curving and waving and tossing in the wind.
This image is another in a series of my re-processings of less-than-new RAW files with Photoshop’s “Super Resolution” machine learning algorithm. As in those other cases, the added impression of detail is particularly astonishing when viewed at full size after clicking through to the original image on Flickr.
Shooting summer landscapes in the Bay Area typically means swaths of gold, blue, and red. Bright pinks and magentas are much less common, but the jackets and graffiti of Grizzly Peak on this particular evening brought those novel hues.
“Escaping from it all” may be difficult in the Bay Area, but an evening picnic in the Berkeley Hills gets pretty close.
Something about the iconic combination of the Golden Gate Bridge, the marine layer, and Berkeley Marina, all bathed in sunset colors, makes me think of before-dinner drinks and cool summer breezes.
Going back over some of my favorite images with “Super Resolution,” there’s no way I was going to skip a second shot at my image that first captured the “civilization gradient” from nature through suburbs to dense urbanity.
One of my favorite images, taken in 2017, captures a person watching the Bay Area sunset from Grizzly Peak. When Photoshop’s new Super Resolution processing brought me back to some of my images from the same vantage in 2013, I was surprised to realized that I had already captured a very similar image. The difference between the burned-out foreground of 2013 and the lush grasses on 2017 is particularly interesting.
In the era before the Bay Bridge and BART tunnel, the ferry between the East Bay and San Francisco departed from the end of a long pier. (The pier used to be even longer—the Berkeley Marina extended into the water around it.) The ferry ended service in 1937, after the bridge opened, but remained a popular location for fishing until it deteriorated to its current unsafe state. I’m kind of fascinated to see its skeleton jutting out into the Bay, a linear form amid rolling marine layer clouds.
We’re not far from the ninth anniversary of the founding of Decaseconds, and I came upon this arresting image of Berkeley Marina, the Marin Headlands, and the Golden Gate Bridge (never before published here) while searching for just the right anniversary shot. I’m fascinated by the way the orange emission of sodium vapor lamps lighting Berkeley (I’m sure now all swapped for white LEDs) matches the Rayleigh-scattered oranges of the winter sunset. The same wavelengths of light, coming from completely different mechanisms.
When my graduate school co-conspirators visited the Bay Area during sabbatical, we couldn’t avoid a trip to the Muir Woods to be back among the enormous redwoods. I won’t deny that I pretended for a moment that I was on Endor.
My favorite view of the Bay Area (and the view that first let me define the idea of the civilization gradient as an element of my photography) is layered up with loads of detail. Down in Berkeley Lab is the building where I worked on sabbatical, and across the Bay Bridge is the completed Salesforce Tower hiding in the marine layer. The differences, particularly from the last time I showed a very similar shot from the spring, are in nature: the high-altitude clouds have been replaced with empty skies and that rolling marine layer, while the green hills have shifted to a dry, highly flammable tan.
Decaseconds 