Treasure Island Harbor and Bay Bridge, Dawn. San Francisco, California. October 25, 2009. © Copyright G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

Sunrise light on the new and old spans of the Bay Bridge at Treasure Island with foreground of boats moored at the Treasure Island harbor.

(It occurred to me yesterday that posting this right now might make sense given that the big news story here in the SF Bay Area is the structural failure of a part of the bridge and the subsequent bridge closure… and area-wide traffic meltdown.)

I had originally planned to be in Yosemite Valley today shooting fall color, but life intervened and there simply wasn’t enough time for a trip to the Valley. Instead I decided to take most of the day and head up towards Muir Woods to do a bit of shooting in the redwoods, hoping for some fall color there. Since I was on the road very early, I had time for a detour out to Treasure Island as I passed through San Francisco so I decided to go out there and try some stitched panoramas of dawn light on San Francisco over the water of the Bay.

I arrived there a good 10-15 minutes before sunrise and made a series of panorama exposures of that iconic scene – perhaps nothing astonishing, but worth the trip half way across the bridge. As I finished shooting this scene I looked back across the road toward the Bay Bridge and Oakland, a scene I’ve photographed before, and was struck by the forms of the backlit towers of the old and new spans of the Bay Bridge, the latter currently under construction. I quickly moved across the road to find a better vantage point and decided to come up with a composition that included the boats moored in the harbor in front of the view of the bridge.

A technical note about what you are seeing. A new, replacement eastern bridge span is under construction next to the old bridge. The structures in crossing the photograph include the old bridge, portions of the new bridge, temporary structures supporting the installation, and cranes. If you look closely (easier to do in a large version than in this small jpg) you can see the cranes at the port of Oakland in the distance beyond the bridge.

This photograph is not in the public domain. It may not be used on websites, blogs, or in any other media without explicit advance permission from G Dan Mitchell.

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