Pilings stretch toward the sky at a San Francisco construction site.
On this April morning I was walking around in the China Basin, Mission Bay area of San Francisco, having arrived on the train at the Fourth and Townsend Caltrain station very early. After photographing some light reflected in buildings not far from the station, I wandered over towards the Mission Bay area. There is a lot of construction going on in this “neighborhood” right now, and one particular block was a hotbed of work.
At one corner of this block work was well underway to set a large number of tall pilings into the ground for – I assume – a building that is soon to be erected here. I managed to maneuver myself into a spot where I could eliminate most of the other distractions and compose a photograph of these structures pointing toward the sky.
G Dan Mitchell is a California photographer whose subjects include the Pacific coast, redwood forests, central California oak/grasslands, the Sierra Nevada, California deserts, urban landscapes, night photography, and more. Blog | About | Flickr | Twitter | Facebook | Google+ | 500px.com | LinkedIn | Email
Pilings along the waterfront photographed at night, Mare Island Naval Ship Yard, California.
This is another photography from my nighttime visit to the historic Mare Island Naval Ship Yard with friends from The Nocturnes in early March of this year. The subject here includes some old and worn pilings along the edge of a ship launching ramp and the still water smoothed by the long exposure necessary to photograph here at night.
This particular spot only recently became accessible (at least without jumping a bunch of cyclone fences or getting someone to open the gate) when waterfront access was created near the ship yard museum. An area that had formerly been off-limits was opened to provide a way to get to the edge of the water, and this path parallels this ramp and the extensive structures alongside. In this photograph I made a color balancing choice that is a bit unusual for me when it comes to night photography in general and shooting at Mare Island in particular. One of the things that I enjoy about the night photography environment at Mare Island is that there are many different types of lighting, each having different color characteristics. Some are merely warmish “tungsten” like colors, others are garish yellows and greens, a few are blue, and the wash of light from nearby Vallejo and even the natural light of the moon can enter the mix. Because of this, I often simply go with the wild colors of the environment here. This scene is lit by grossly yellow sodium vapor lamps, and the “natural” coloration of the scene is quite intensely saturated. For this image I decided to color adjust this much closer to what might be regarded as a more neutral light color.
G Dan Mitchell is a California photographer whose subjects include the Pacific coast, redwood forests, central California oak/grasslands, the Sierra Nevada, California deserts, urban landscapes, night photography, and more. Blog | About | Flickr | Twitter | Facebook | Google+ | 500px.com | LinkedIn | Email
The pilings of a long-abandoned pier on the Pacific coast near Davenport, California.
(Since the time when I wrote this message I have also posted another photograph of this scene made a bit earlier the same evening.)
Besides being a matter of hours from the Sierra Nevada and less than a day’s drive from places like Death Valley, I can be at the Pacific coast between San Francisco and Santa Cruz in barely more than a half hour. Yesterday it looked like evening conditions might be interesting so I headed over there in the late afternoon. As I crossed the mountains on my way there I was pleasantly surprised to see low clouds over the ridges and some higher clouds over towards the ocean, which got my hopes up for some sort of spectacular evening light. However, when I actually got the the coast the conditions were not as interesting – mostly clear with just a bit of cloudiness on the horizon, and no interesting haze or mist over the water. Either that or I just wasn’t “seeing it” this time. So, after stopping for a cup of coffee, I headed up the coast from Santa Cruz and stopped at several of the usual locations, but didn’t make a single exposure. At the northernmost point on my drive I stopped right by the water and it looked like interesting light might be five or ten minutes away… and then the sun dropped below some low clouds near the horizon and the light died!
I think I’ve learned to go with the flow when this happens. I react in several ways. One is to look around for subjects other than those that I thought I was there for. With that in mind I thought about photographing shore birds… but there was only one forlorn seagull down near the water. I saw an interesting pool of water on the beach and thought it might play into a seascape photograph, but the flat light and cloudless sky was not working. I remembered a spot a bit further south where I had once shot some shoreline shoals from the top of a steep cliff at sunset, so I quickly drove up that way… and couldn’t find them!
I had one final thought. On the way north I had seen a group of photographers on the bluff near the northern edge of Davenport. I had stopped, leaving my camera equipment in the car, and quickly dashed out to where they were set up to see what was so interesting. Below their position were the four remaining supports from an old pier that washed away many years ago. It looked interesting and I recognized the structure from photographs that others have made from down on the beach – but I hadn’t been up for the steep descent to the beach so I had driven on after making a mental note about a position from which I thought a photograph might be made. Now I realized that if I went straight there that I might be able to make some long exposures in the dying light and perhaps frame them so that they only contained the structures and the open sea. So, off I went.
I arrived just before the moment of sunset and, sure enough, the group of photographers I had seen earlier was still there. I grabbed my gear and quickly walked out to the point I had scoped out earlier, which was some distance from where they were set up. I framed up this composition and then photographed right though sunset until there wasn’t really enough light to keep shooting. (The group at one point looked like they thought the show was over and they were going to leave, but I think they saw me continuing to shoot and decided to stick around almost as long as I did.) The light just kept getting more interesting as it faded. Although it was too dark to really see the image as it appears here, I knew that this three minute exposure (intentionally lengthened by choosing a small aperture and low ISO) would smooth out the surface of the water but still show the shadows and reflections of the old pilings.
This photograph is not in the public domain and may not be used on websites, blogs, or in other media without advance permission from G Dan Mitchell.
A pier beneath the west end of the San Francisco Oakland Bay Bridge with downtown San Francisco, California.
The light was a challenge in this photograph, but I found the dense and somewhat out of kilter lines and forms of the pier, bridge, and downtown buildings interesting. The photograph was made from one of the piers along the Embarcadero that is used as a parking lot – extending out into the Bay a bit it gave me a view back toward the City over and through the intervening structures.
This photograph is not in the public domain and may not be used on websites, blogs, or in other media without advance permission from G Dan Mitchell.
