North Tower of the Golden Gate Bridge, San Francisco Oakland Bay Bridge. San Francisco, California. February 5, 2011. © Copyright G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.
Black and white photograph of the north tower of the Golden Gate Bridge silhouetted against San Francisco Bay morning haze and the San Francisco Oakland Bay Bridge.
A week ago I posted a few other photographs from this early morning winter visit to the upper reaches of the Marin Headlands, from which I photographed the bridges of the San Francisco Bay, backlit by early sun and partially obscured by a low layer of fog and haze. Since I am not fond of adding poetic (or pseudo-poetic) titles to my photographs, preferring to let them say whatever they have to say on their own, I have resisted the temptation to call this one “The Three Towers.” ;-)
The dark shape in the foreground that dominates the frame is, of course, the north tower of the Golden Gate Bridge. Shooting it in this light is trickier than it might seem like it should be. The light coming from beyond, reflected and amplified by water and haze, is very bright – almost hard to look at directly. So the west side of the bridge is deeply shadowed. I like the dark and stark shape of the tower here – as opposed to the more familiar photographs front or side lit by late afternoon or evening light – but the trick is to keep just a bit of detail in that nearly black tower.
The scene posed another technical issue, though it probably isn’t visible in this small version. As the sun comes up and heats the atmosphere, and as wind blows (and it was windy on this morning!) there is a lot of atmospheric turbulence. Normally you wouldn’t notice this at all, but when you shoot with a long lens and enlarge the image you quickly see that sharp edges and fine lines take on an almost “painterly” quality as the atmosphere shimmers, much in the manner of a mirage.
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Excellent, thank you for the explanation Dan – it makes a lot of sense. Allowing a little detail in the bridge seems to add a fair amount more interest.
Good questions, Jeff. I had to think a lot about how to deal with the bridge in this photo, especially in the context of the print I made yesterday. And, technically, you are correct that it isn’t literally a silhouette if some detail is visible, I suppose.
Generally, I don’t want to have large completely black areas in a print. I do want – in most cases – some very small areas of complete black, but I want to have a bit of detail even in these areas. So I work to retain some very faint shadow detail – and this is a tricky thing. (It is an especially tricky thing when it comes to guessing what others will see on their monitors when they look at a jpg!)
In the case of this photograph, rather than going for a completely black silhouette, I wanted to a) have the dark mass of the bridge tower stand out against the background water and fog and so forth, b) retain at least a suggestion of the detail of the bridge tower, and c) target all of this primarily for the results in the print.
In order to have the bridge stand out against the water, one option would, indeed, be to “go darker” on the bridge in order to have more contrast between the overall luminosity of the water and the luminosity of the bridge – but that would make for an interpretation that pushes the bridge dangerously close (in my view) to going all the way to black. So instead I did a bit of a curve adjustment on the bridge that anchors a few spots at completely black but also increases very slightly the luminosity of the lightest of the near-black tones here… and I used a separate curve (in a gradient that fades from bottom to about the middle of the frame) to somewhat lighten the surface of the water behind the bridge. This created the same differential between bridge and water, lightened the image overall, and let me hold on to that detail in the bridge.
Of course, yesterday’s print was the first run… and things could change after I live with it a bit.
Take care,
Dan
Dan – one question. I I can see a little detail in the bridge tower, thus having a hard time reckoning with the word “silhouette” – can you share why you decided to keep the bridge in what looks like zone 2-3 (on my monitor, which admittedly is not calibrated) instead of going zone 1?