HDR Photography
For Halloween, I offer you a photograph from this weekend’s trip to San Francisco’s Coit Tower. Nob Hill, backlit by sunset, highlights the sinister aesthetic complexity that fascinates me about cities. When viewed from afar, this tangle of streets, cluttered rooftops, and modernist towers seems to hold so many secrets. Maybe I’ve been watching too many films noir. Either way, the onset of night in a crowded place certainly has its own unique visual palette.
OK, so not a real spaceship but it does sort of look like something out of an episode of Dr. Who, doesn’t it? I caught this one in downtown SF the other evening. The lighting on the building really caught my eye but only once I was directly underneath it. I captured this shot, which I think is very interesting to look at, and thought I’d share.
With the sun setting behind me into the Pacific, the light on the Golden Gate Bridge, the city, and the Bay Bridge beyond it (thus the sandwich effect) begins to shift from golden to deep blue. The lights came on just as the rain started to spit, and the whole scene made me wish I’d brought a thermos of hot chocolate with me.
I’ve shown before how beautiful the Fourth of July can be in the Bay Area; the overlapping sensory inputs of multiple fireworks shows is stunning. This year, the Berkeley Marina’s display was particularly lovely.
One of my favorite views in the Bay Area from from Grizzly Hill. (You might recognize a bit of this picture from an earlier night shoot.) I love the combination of dense city in San Francisco, sylvan suburbs in Berkeley, and proper trees in Strawberry Canyon and LBNL.
The face of this massive grandfather clock comes from the Legion of Honor museum (from which I’ve posted some one of my other favorite shots). The level of craftsmanship exhibited (both in the clock face, and the Legion in general) is just overwhelming. The detail makes me think of some sort of grand alethiometer. My favorite feature, though, is the way the contrast brings out the enscription, “solem arte equor.” If my very rusty Latin is correct, this roughly means “sun by the sea.” Given the Legion’s gorgeous surroundings on the Pacific Ocean, I think it’s quite appropriate.
And now a quick holiday bonus. I wanted to get this one out while it was fresh in my mind: the glorious experience of watching half a dozen Fourth of July fireworks shows simultaneously. It’s moments like this, gazing over the bay and its gorgeous lights, that I really appreciate living here.
The Bay Area has a set of dichotomies that I’ve always loved fitting into photographs. Here, we have the elegance of San Francisco herself, with towers and an array of sailing boats, contrasted with the decay of the East Bay and its own host of boats.
Whenever Photomatix releases an update, I like to go back and see what I can do with old RAW files and new software. This shot is a little bit older now, but I fell in love with the way it captures so much of the Bay Area in a single image: the Port of Oakland on the left, bits of Berkeley on the bottom-right, the Bay Bridge and Yerba Buena in the center, and San Francisco itself on the right. For so much of the year, the sky is absolutely clear until the marine layer blankets the bay in fog. The fog was just sliding over the hills as I took this shot; in a few minutes, the city had disappeared.
Here’s the exciting secret of photographing the Golden Gate Bridge: because of the cruel nature of geography, there is exactly one bluff from which to get reasonable pictures of the bridge. Greater than 80% of all Golden Gate Bridge photographs in existence are from the same place (with another 10% coming from the city side.) On any given evening, you’ll see dozens of photographers clustered in the Marin Headlands, set apart only by small differences in compositional preference.
The most interesting thing I discovered in taking pictures of the Golden Gate Bridge, however, was that there is an enormous fence corralling the area. Just as most pictures use a similar angle to incorporate most of the bridge, most pictures also carefully crop away this fence. There are also myriad holes in the fence where rebellious souls have cut spots to poke their lenses through. I was most interested by the interplay of the curving fence links with the solid, glowing form of the bridge. In a way, I think today’s shot paints a truer picture of the sometimes compromised (but always gorgeous) experience of photographing the Golden Gate Bridge.
I previously posted a narrower shot of this heavily-graffitied gun battery in the Marin Headlands. It really is incredible how much time and effort have gone into layering art on top of a concrete structure that began as so monolithic and practical. Adding in the encroaching pine needles makes for one Hell of a juxtaposition.
This weekend, Brendan and I blitzed down to Half Moon Bay (or just north of it) to catch the sunset. The beach was arched and curving from the local currents, the waves were seriously up, and I got the camera on the tripod just in time to catch today’s shot.
Just after New Year’s Day, I had the chance to visit the beautiful Legion of Honor fine art museum in San Francisco. Though the museum itself is full of totally stunning works, perhaps the local architecture is even more stunning. The mix of natural and man-made elements in the setting feels so totally elegant.
When the weather turns cold and blustery and rainy, a warm place (e.g. library, cafe, bed) feels like a fortress. On this particular day in the Marin Headlands overlooking the Golden Gate Bridge, it was definitely cold, blustery, and rainy, but without a warm place to retreat to while shooting, I made do with a literal fortress, instead.
Here’s a shot I took a while back of one of the Bay Area’s most infamous landmarks. It was sort of a gray, hazy day but with a little judicious tweaking I feel like the island really pops.
Decaseconds 