Parking Lot Near Pier 48, Morning. San Francisco, California. July 8, 2011. © Copyright G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.
Morning light on a large parking lot near Pier 48, San Francisco.
Continuing with the “urban landscape” theme, this is a photograph of a parking lot south of the bridge next to ATT Park and near the buildings of Pier 48 in San Francisco. After getting off the train that arrived in San Francisco at 7:00 a.m. and wandering over to Townsend Street, I decided to cross the what I think must be the Mission Bay inlet and take a look through this area which was rather deserted at this early hour. (Come back here before a Giants game, and the parking lot will be completely full of the cars of people who are willing to spend exorbitant amounts to park here.)
While there were cars in other portions of this parking lot that are closer to likely destinations, at this far end there was a single lonely car, and that seemed like it could be an anchor for a photograph of the lot, the tall streetlight poles, the industrial-looking buildings of Pier 48 and other assorted waterfront things. Because it was so early, the sun rising across the bay was filling the air with brilliant light that created a sky that was more white than blue.
In addition to the obvious crop, this image required other kinds of substantial work in post. The first issue was controlling the very brightest parts of the sky and a second was the follow-up need to then lighten a few other areas to get some detail back into the image. Color balance was a tricky thing – this isn’t that far from what the raw file contained, though I did warm the colors just a bit. I also did something in this image that I rarely do, namely use semi-opaque blurred and desaturated overlay layer of the original image to do, well, some stuff that is a bit hard to describe in written form. Suffice it to say that this had an effect on the parking lot and on the brightness of the sky.
G Dan Mitchell Photography
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Thanks for your comment, David. It is interesting that another person used literally the same words (“faraway” and “lonely”) to describe this photograph somewhere else. I suppose that at an unconscious level that I was thinking of something along these lines when I made the exposure, though I don’t think I had quite articulated it in my own mind.
The choice to include the single car has an effect in this regard. Given what I saw as I walked around this area, I could have used a completely empty section of the parking lot or another section that was full of cars, but I knew there was something about the single vehicle (parked as if abandoned) that made me want to place it in the frame. I also thought about the role of the light poles – while I know that they are just parking lot lights, there is something about how they stand and how they are not perfectly vertical that enhances that sense of abandonment. The light was wonderful, and I kind of light that I often but now always am able to find over the SF Bay in the morning. I think that it is due to some combination of thinning fog, the moisture over the water, and the backlighting of this atmosphere – but somehow it often seems to glow in compelling ways. I almost always look for it when I’m shooting in this area.
As far as the post processing goes, little was done to the color balance. It was early enough that the warm color was a product of the early light. I did apply a very slight overlay layer than was subject to a Gaussian blur, which retains detail but softens the glow just a bit. Some softening was also created at the time of exposure, simply because of the effect of shooting straight into this glowing atmosphere. A bit of dodging and curves work was necessary to even out the illumination on the parking lot and retain a bit of the detail in the shadowed areas of the buildings, but that was about it.
Dan
This one sure captures a faraway and lonely mood to me. The blurring or whatever you did seems to have made it like an old photograph somehow. Beautiful.