Marin Headlands, Winter Evening. San Francisco Bay Area, California. January 17, 2014. © Copyright 2014 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.
Golden evening haze over the Pacific Coast below the rugged cliffs of the Marin headlands
How we ended up here on this evening in a slightly complicated and random story. Our main goal was to go San Francisco’s De Young Museum, where the big show of David Hockney’s work was entering its final days – we had been planning to go but somehow the time passed and it was now or never. I’d write, “It is a great show and you should go…” but it is too late! Hockney’s work is engrossing and compelling and includes subjects that a landscape photographer can identify with. (Hockney’s relationship to photography is interesting and, it seems, a bit complex. He is known for some photo collages that he created, yet he disparages photography or at least the way photography is often done. He apparently said something about photography along the lines of it being fine if you want to view the world from the point of view of a paralyzed cyclops. Ouch!)
We spent a few hours in the exhibit and then it was mid afternoon. There were still a couple of hours of light left, so we decided to head across the Golden Gate Bridge, but with only the vaguest of plans in mind. (Basically the plan consisted of “Coffee and then look for something before the light is gone.”) By the time we got over there and were ready to look for light, we realized that we had only a short time before the light would go and we would have to head back over the bridge to get dinner. (We had reservations at a favorite Indian restaurant.) We realized that we had only enough time to drive up into the headlands on our way to the bridge, so up Conzelman Road we went. I missed a mysterious and ominous photograph of a large freighter in the haze outside the Golden Gate since I wasn’t able to find a place to stop and park – but we finally managed to park the car and get out and look around. I did not take my camera gear out at first, since I have more than enough photographs of The City and the bridge at sunset, but soon I became interested in the backlit glow around the rugged cliffs dropping to the water to the west and then the expanse of glowing, hazy air stretching over the water towards the horizon, where water and sky merged invisibly.
G Dan Mitchell is a California photographer and visual opportunist whose subjects include the Pacific coast, redwood forests, central California oak/grasslands, the Sierra Nevada, California deserts, urban landscapes, night photography, and more.
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Text, photographs, and other media are © Copyright G Dan Mitchell (or others when indicated) and are not in the public domain and may not be used on websites, blogs, or in other media without advance permission from G Dan Mitchell.