HDR Photography
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.
I’ve already posted a few shots from inside the Westgate Hotel, but very few of the view outside. The civic center area of downtown San Diego has a strange claustrophobia to it that I’ve not felt in cities like Chicago or New York, despite their narrower streets. As the morning light first started to battle past the towers, I was feeling this constriction most poignantly.
The Bay Bridge connecting Oakland and San Francisco is actually a pair of bridges, resting for a moment on the island of Yerba Buena. Attached to Yerba Buena is the ironically-named Treasure Island, a man-made island composed entirely of fill. From there, photographing either the East Bay or San Francisco itself works out quite nicely. Today’s shot of the western span of the bridge has a bit of the unlit Yerba Buena outcropping on the left and the hyperintense lights of AT&T Park (home of the SF Giants) under the bridge. On this particularly clear night, I was thrilled to be able to capture it all without a thick slathering of fog.
Decaseconds 