HDR Photography
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.
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.
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.
There is something very dramatic about the rocky beaches around the San Francisco bay area.
Though most pictures show the San Francisco of gleaming buildings like the Transamerica Pyramid, there’s another San Francisco of a perfect grid of squat buildings clinging to undulating hills.
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.
Like Manhattan, San Francisco is largely trapped by water. Like Manhattan, the city has preserved large swaths of “natural” space (e.g. Central Park, Golden Gate Park) in that hyperdense urban mass. The Mediterranean climate, youth, and topographical preposterousness of San Francisco give it a unique (pardon the neologism) architexture. Looking west from the trees of Telegraph Hill, over Russian Hill and on to the Presidio and the Golden Gate Bridge, the cross-section of environments complement each other. My mind still struggles to see the towers of Russian Hill in the same image as the inhospitable rocks of Marin.
Dollar Days at Golden Gate Fields: dollar beers, dollar hot dogs, dollar admissions. Delicious, preposterous revelry. And rivalry.
Mostly, I just love the dynamic sense of motion captured here. (And the texture differences between horse, grass, and dirt.)
Climbing Telegraph Hill on foot means stairs. Lots and lots of stairs.
Climbing Telegraph Hill by car means loops. Lots and lots of loops.
(Though I’m sure my memory is exaggerating.) On that winding road through the trees and stones, under the watchful eyes of the wild parrots, are occasional glimpses of the Golden Gate Bridge. With the last wisps of sunlight landing on the hill, the craggily texture of the tarmac and the rocks and trees contrast so perfectly the with the far-off Platonic idealism of that bridge.
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.
Today’s photo, taken just as the rain started to pick up in the Marin Headlands, is one of my favorites. The alignment of this little bridge to the Golden Gate itself, the harbor, the construction equipment, with Angel Island and the rest of the North Bay off in the distance: it all provides a sense of scale and perspective. The way the warm sodium lamps contrast with the colors of the evening bring your eye to the bridge and its gorgeous structural steel. Rigid geometries contrast with the fuzzy plants of the hillside. This is a picture I want to crawl inside.
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.
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.
Decaseconds 