Behind San Francisco are clouds both natural (horizontal) and the product of human craft (the vertical spiral).
Tag: Skyline
Red Spinnaker
Racing sailboats on San Francisco Bay is the sort of upper-class pastime that seems perfectly suited for a flawless blue evening in late spring. Placid water meets busy city meets bright sails.
Transbay Tower Grating Effect
No offense to Salesforce, but the rainbow sunset reflections off the curved surface of their tower seem to fit much better with a building named “Transbay Tower”—particularly when it sits on the skyline near the Transamerica Pyramid. The darkened and humble shape of Alcatraz in the foreground makes for an appropriate memento mori to San Francisco’s grand architecture.
Water Front
The view of the Seattle’s skyline from across the harbor always gives me the warm and fuzzies.
Rather Be Sailing
Morning sun provides very stark, even lighting across the San Francisco Bay. I know rationally that gravity forces the big body of water to be (basically) flat, but the curves of the shore and the shadows of the clouds have always made the Bay itself seem to have hills and valleys. I can also confirm that the water feels pretty far from level when actually sailing it.
500 mm Tower
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.
Definitive San Francisco, Temporarily
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.
Pike Place
From the other side.
Ottawide 2014
Visiting nearby Canada means looking at a mirror-version of the United States, reflected across the border. Like looking in a mirror, everything is still recognizable. Up is still up. Down is still down. But the brands and the metric units and the nationalism is different. Does looking in the reflection of Ottawa in the Shaw Centre reverse the transformation?
An added bonus: this is technically a self-portrait, with my tiny self down in the foreground.
San Diego Morning
Time zones are a source of confusion and consternation (seriously, they’re insane to deal with). Jet lag can be surprisingly disruptive. There are some temporal challenges to transcontinental (not to mention intercontinental) travel.
But sometimes the time zones align and travel makes waking at dawn trivial. To get a view of the San Diego skyline with the perfect mix of lighting and color, and with minimal sleep deprivation, was a treat.
Emerald City
It may not be be in Oz, but it’s definitely not in Kansas, and located in the verdant Evergreen State, Seattle is definitely the Emerald City.
Transamerica Gradient
San Francisco at the end of Saturday: to paraphrase the Hold Steady, the lines of the city are awash in hot, soft light. I’ve rambled in the past on the gradient between nature and dense urbanization, and the special anomaly that the San Francisco Bay Area represents in its gentle juxtaposition of wood and concrete (buildings). This particular photograph from Telegraph Hill tells the story: the towering, mythical shape of the Transamerica Pyramid and a hill of grasses, with less than a half-a-mile walk separating them.
Shattuck Rooftops
Looking south, over the rooftops and streetlights of downtown Berkeley, the high-rise buildings of Oakland and Emeryville are luminescent ghosts in the bay fog. I’ve come back to this photograph again and again—the composition isn’t quite right, the quality is just average, but for some reason I find it inescapable. I can forgive all of its sins (and mine in taking it) for the trajectory of those sodium lamps, arcing gently to the south like some fairy worm.
This is Telegraph Ave.
A mid-winter shot down Telegraph Ave. to the heart of Oakland (from the top of Berkeley’s Campanile) is more nostalgia-tinged now than when I took it. And I do appreciate the way that this shot captures the Bay and the hills ringing it, the silvan suburbia of the East Bay, and even the oddly broad California streets.
Ultimately, even with the benefit of nostalgia, I still have mixed feelings about Oakland. In some ways, the existence of Oakland allows San Francisco to be an “unbalanced chemical equation,” pushing off many of its problems across the bay. Everything can still look peaceful from a distance.
The Space Needle
Such an iconic part of Seattle’s skyline, I grabbed this shot from Kerry Park on a very Seattle day. Only thing better would be if the mountain had been out.
Decaseconds 