Bay – Page 5 – Decaseconds

Definitive San Francisco, Temporarily

2017-Feb-15 adohertyh1 Comment

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.

Sunset. Stat

2017-Feb-01 adohertyhLeave a comment

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.

The Gate and the Devil Z

2017-Jan-25 adohertyh2 Comments

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.

Bridges to the Golden City

2017-Jan-16 adohertyhLeave a comment

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.

Angel Island Silhouette

2017-Jan-02 adohertyh1 Comment

Angel Island played a critical role in the history of immigration to the West Coast, but now it’s a nature preserve (free of invasive eucalyptus trees) with only a couple of light-emitting structures at night. This makes the island dark and mysterious at night, as it floats in front of the lights and civilization of Marin.

Grizzly Christmas

2016-Dec-28 adohertyh1 Comment

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.

Birdblur

2016-Jul-01 adohertyhLeave a comment

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.

San Francisco Is Alien

2015-Sep-30 adohertyh3 Comments

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.

Campus, Bay, and City

2015-Jul-10 adohertyhLeave a comment

The view from atop Berkeley’s Campanile is a nostalgic one, with San Francisco and Oakland popping up in the distance above the sprawl. Walking along those broad, slightly cracked, and sun-baked pathways of Berkeley’s campus never quite felt natural, though. Can a place magnified beyond human scale feel that way?

Span Aside

2015-Mar-09 adohertyhLeave a comment

This photograph is a double-case of finding interesting details by looking away from the obvious. On one hand, this subtler image was captured opposite an intense sunset over San Francisco. The color palette is heavy with pastels, but accented with a few harsh reds from Oakland in the distance. In the image itself, there’s a tiny building under the right-hand span of the bridge. Seeing something so (let’s say) adorably sized next to something so dominant and enormous makes for a charming contrast.

Bricks and Birds

2015-Feb-04 adohertyh2 Comments

The contrast of textures and shapes really attracted me to this shot: glossy glass and steel in the background buildings in contrast to the Harbor Court Hotel’s matte brick, and ephemeral sea birds in contrast with the solid structure of the hotel.

Golden Gate and Bay in the Rain

2014-Apr-30 adohertyh1 Comment

I sometimes sift through the RAW files I took long in the past, searching for meaning in images I captured long ago. In the case of this particular photograph, there’s more to the image than just my favorite Bay Area gradient of differing environments (e.g. Oakland and San Francisco and Alcatraz and two different enormous bridges and so on): there’s also a feeling of place and moment. The dramatic clouds and the grasses and the hint of the Golden Gate’s span are all spectacular, but the optics of a raindrop spattered across the lens add just as much to the image. You can practically smell the petrichor in the air.

Last Light: Port of Oakland

2013-Nov-18 adohertyh3 Comments

Across the San Francisco Bay, under the shadow of the East Bay hills, the Port of Oakland hums busily along. From far away and in the golden light of sunset, it’s easy to forget the sophisticated dance of distribution that keeps the urban tangle of the Bay Area alive.

Hills of British Columbia

2013-Sep-02 adohertyhLeave a comment

Outside Vancouver (the city) are the hillsides, dotted with homes and apartment buildings and, farther north, massive rocks. (That’s a pretty rare combination.) The difference between the soft, welcoming pink hues of the sunset and those massive hillsides (with some lovely evergreens in the foreground) is stranger, the more I think about it.

This picture also illustrates the biggest difference I’ve encountered since moving from the west coast to the east: the environments are less staggering and overwhelming, but the skies (and the buildings) are much more so. I’ve had to reorient the way I shoot to account for it.

San Francisco’s Red Towers

2013-Aug-05 adohertyh1 Comment

The eternally-damp shoreline of the San Francisco Bay is the fascinating meeting of quaint docks and maritime randomness with the aggressive mass of a full-scale city. Charming piers abut the grandiosity of the Financial District, and the result is a surreal and unique setting. Amid this hubbub, the Coit Tower and the Embarcadero stand out as red beacons.