HDR Photography
San Francisco is the home of tech bros and hippies, making it all the more surprising that it’s also the home of Harry Callahan. Dirty Harry lived in Nob Hill (on the right side of this picture); the rough look of the image through my 500 mm mirror lens (used in this earlier panorama) seems to fit his style.
The lights of Alcatraz matched the color of the sunset for just a moment.
San Francisco is a city in flux: growing, expanding, redefining itself and how it interacts with the world. Sutro Tower and the Transamerica Pyramid are being joined by new structures. A new span has replaced an old one on the Bay Bridge. Capturing the aggregate geometry of the skyline (including features, like Hills Bros. Coffee, or the view from Treasure Island, I’ve approached from other angles), I have what is (to me) the definitive view of the city. As these new structures arrive, that definitiveness will prove to be only temporary.
Stitching together images taken with my 500 mm mirror lens resulted in this 95 MP monster panorama, assembled into a high-detail survey of this particular moment in the skyline’s history. I encourage you to click through to examine the full-resolution original.
The Pacific Ocean meets the San Francisco Bay through the Golden Gate. With so much happening in a concentrated location, the density of interesting stuff frankly demands a panorama to capture it all. I particularly like the tiny shape of Alcatraz, floating off to the left with its windows reflecting the setting sun.
The key to getting the most incredible image of a view is to take “luck”/chance out of the equation. I’ve been watching this same view (from the balcony of my research facility at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory) almost every night for just the right kind of sunset to appear. After a hazy, cloudy day, I hadn’t expected last night’s sunset to have much character—until I was texted by a friend at the lab: “Sunset. Stat”
The reds were worth it.
Equally astonishing to me is that this image wasn’t taken with my DSLR, bur rather was assembled from multiple exposures taken with my iPhone 7 Plus. Though I doubt a compromised phone camera can ever replace my handy/chunky main camera, it makes an incredible back-up option.
I’ve had an attraction to Datsun Z cars since I read Wangan Midnight as a teenager and first encountered the “Devil Z”. Around the Bay Area, plenty of these cars are still running, and those that have survived this long come to resemble the style goals of their owners. That might be the “rough style” Z I photographed in Berkeley, or this super-clean example that was kind enough to park in the Marin Headlands overlooking the Golden Gate Bridge and San Francisco.
Being back in the Bay Area for sabbatical, I need to take a proper picture of the great spans (Bay and Golden Gate) of the area. The absurd topology of San Francisco and the incredible architecture of this space is laid before the camera in the Marin Headlands.
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory sits in the Berkeley Hills, so close to multiple centers of scientific and technological innovation; the intellectual climate on its campus is astonishing. One of the newer facilities on campus is the science-fiction-come-to-life Molecular Foundry. The most dramatic part of the building hangs in space above the bay. I can’t resist the image of a spacecraft coming in for a landing.
Christmas, back in the Bay Area! Up on Berkeley’s Grizzly Peak, alongside the tuners and drinkers and stoners, the clouds rolled over the hills and the whole bowl of the Bay lit up. This is a weird and special place.
If this week on Decaseconds has had a theme, it has been structures suspended over water at sunset. It has also been a week of long-exposure shots that live up to the site’s title. Hoards of gulls riding on the waves are reduced to weird ghost-blurs in the foreground of the San Francisco Bay Bridge, Yerba Buena, and the Port of Oakland.
It’s too bad they demolished the Miles Rock Lighthouse, it looks like it would have a great photography subject. As it stands, what’s left looks like the remnants of some kind of sea fortification of a bygone era.
It seemed crazy at the time but with some distance behind me, there are things about the bay area and grad school I miss. Chief among them are the views across the bay.
The golden flares of sunset in San Francisco amp up the unreal qualities of the place. That wacky Lombard Street is only the third or fourth most interesting thing about the picture speaks to the profound weirdness. I hope the homogenizing influence of extreme wealth doesn’t change it too much.
The side streets of San Francisco let the sneaky photographer creep up on an unsuspecting building. The tallest building in the skyline looks oddly small in this context. I particularly like the details at street level—restaurants, people, and signs, all a world apart from the geometric perfection of the pyramid.
At the moment the sunset sets behind the hills, the sky above San Francisco is still gold, but the massive structures and high-tech vehicles of the city below are activating their illumination machines and preparing for night beneath the marine layer. If the Bay Area is a loose solar system of different worlds, San Francisco must be its cyberpunk crown jewel.
Decaseconds 