HDR Photography
Coit Tower, on its leafy green (i.e. unlit at night) hillside, makes for an odd break in the structure of the more northerly parts of San Francisco. I particularly like this short of the juxtaposition of the Tower’s aesthetic beauty with the utilitarian structures of Treasure Island in the foreground.
I’m sure there’s a perfectly mundane aeronautical explanation for the spectacular spiral trail weaving between the sunset clouds over San Francisco. I’m also sure that I prefer to imagine something much more exotic and high-performance.
San Francisco’s verticality comes from its steep hills. Increasingly, however, that z-dimension size is being joined by towering additions to the skyline. Though I know it’s a contentious issue locally, I’m excited to see the new construction in downtown.
My past couple of posts have been images of San Francisco, foregrounded by nature and suburbs—the style I like to call a “civilization gradient”. This image similarly presents downtown Oakland, California, past the hilltop homes and Cal fields of Strawberry Canyon and through the invasive alien leaves of Berkeley Lab’s eucalyptus trees. The HDR processing techniques that Brendan and I use are perfect for settings like this, with an array of light intensities across a broad landscape.
The work day is ending and the eight-to-six employees are returning home. They meet in bars or at rec leagues or around the table or in front of the TV, but the hour is still too early to head out for a night’s adventure. In between work and nightlife is dinner time. We’re not tired enough to go to bed yet; the night is young and full of paths over which to integrate (to borrow Feynman’s view).
Red sunset light hit the hilltops of Marin and the span of the Golden Gate Bridge and just a bit of San Francisco, but the little hikers in the foreground are sheltered from it. So too, I assume, are the people on the streets between San Francisco’s skyscrapers. Many of my favorite photographs are those that show the gradient from nature to dense urbanity, and I think this one fits that bill.
Up in the hills, Berkeley Lab possesses some different environmental features from the East Bay below. As sunsets like this finish the day, frogs begin to croak in the hills and the whole lab transitions from a bustling science facility to a nighttime wildlife preserve. Late-night buses are cautious for deer, turkeys, and even the occasional mountain lion.
The lights of Alcatraz matched the color of the sunset for just a moment.
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.
The sun-streets of California, I hear, are where longboarders got their start. That vehicle remains popular with the undergraduates of most colleges and universities, I’ve noticed, from snowy St. Lawrence to here in Berkeley. The bravery to venture into traffic on a bright Saturday afternoon is admirable.
(Or maybe I’m just jealous of the skill required.)
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.
The Bay Area seems to experience seasons at a different pace from much of the rest of the country. Summer is a month-long period from mid-August through mid-September, fall lasts from October through March, and the summer goes from April until August. Winter (as the East Coast understands it) isn’t a part of the equation. Being back in fall, then, has me reminiscing about fall in the North Country, with leaves starting to dot the ground and the Blue Hour arriving sooner.
Berkeley’s undergraduate student population is still mostly gone for winter break, leaving UCB’s campus to resemble St. Lawrence’s during Fall Break in October. The empty-ish parking lots might be bleak, but at least it’s easy to get a table at lunch time.
And one final bonus from that fall weekend: a most dramatic and exciting picture of a most unexciting car. I present to you: the World’s Most Interesting Toyota RAV-4.
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.
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.
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