Man sitting on a bench in front of a San Francisco building and talking on his cell phone.
The first time I worked on this photograph, I made a decision to work it up as a black and white image. However, when I returned to it a month or so ago, I felt like it might be interesting as a color photograph as well.
There is nothing all that special about the location itself – it is on a small street in an area that might be thought of as along the edges of downtown San Francisco. It is not too far to typical large downtown buildings, but here it seems that many might residences and rental units, and many on this street are connected with the Academy of Arts College (or is it “university” now?) facilities that are spread all around the city. I’m intrigued by the interesting shapes and colors and textures of these San Francisco buildings, that often embody some strange combination of a great deal of order (carefully painted rectangular white window frames), utility (the fire escape being almost the most prominent thing on the front of the building), and little oddities (the benches on a slanting sidewalk and guy talking obliviously on his cell phone).
The springtime morning sun shines through a pair of oak trees in the Calero Hills south of San Jose, California.
On the final day of April and for the first time this season, I found to go for a hike at my favorite local park, a place where I have walked just about every available trail (and invented a few routes of my own) and photographed for a number of years. The park would not seem like anything all that special by comparison to some of the other places I visit, but it is close and I’ve gotten to know it in a way that makes it more special. The place is called the Calero County Park, part of the Santa Clara County Parks system.
The entrance to the park is in a broad valley that is largely occupied by stables. (Or, used to be – it looks like the stables must have closed since last season.) Rising from this valley are the typical grass-covered hills of central and northern California, with oaks and other trees scattered around and, in places, thicker trees and brush. At this time of year, the hills turn what I call “impossibly green” – and if you have seen them on a late-winter or early spring morning you know what I mean.
I started this hike a bit after dawn, so the golden hour light was more or less gone. I had a general idea of photographing some wildflowers (which didn’t happen – it was too windy) and some oak trees that grow alone or in small groups on the grass-covered hills. I passed a small lake – where a single egret often hangs out, but not on this morning – and topped a rise and descended into a small valley from which I have made quite a few photographs of oaks. It didn’t look too promising at first, but at the far end of this area I noticed that a pair of trees were still obscuring the sun and that I might be able to shoot straight into the sun with the trees blocking its disk, and get a photograph including the tree shadows on the hillside grasses.
This turned out to be another of those all-too-common ephemeral photographs in that the sun was starting to rise above the top branches of the tree and would soon be “out in the open,” making it much too bright for what I had in mind. So I worked quickly to set up tripod and camera and select a lens, then frame a composition, focus, and make a series of exposures that might be needed to deal with the huge dynamic range between direct sun and backlit tree trunks. By the time I had everything set up and was ready to shoot the sun had already risen above the upper branches, so I ended up looking for a slightly better shadow and putting the tripod down very low – and this gave me must enough time to make the series of exposures I figured I would need.
In the end, I got lucky. One single shot somehow managed to not blow the sun out too badly yet hold enough detail in the grass that a bit of work in post could bring it back. With all of the potential for lens flare – which I had to some extent in every shot – this one only had two small bits of it, and they were easily dealt with.
Photograph of Richardson Bay from Marin hills, showing Tiburon Peninsula, Angel Island, downtown Oakland, East Bay Hills, and Mount Diablo in the distance.
This photograph was shot from essentially the same position as the previous one, a black and white photo of the same vista, though with shorter focal length. I used a longer focal length here to try to enlarge to closer elements and leave out some of the stuff along the edges, and to minimize the amount of sky to some extent. I liked the color version of this – it was hard for me to think about giving up the nice overall blue haze, but even more to give up the was of light on some of the green grassy areas at the bottom of the frame.
There is quite a bit of stuff in this image, so let me describe what you see. At the bottom of the frame are hills above Marin City. Beyond the foreground hills you see Richardson Bay, which is an arm of San Francisco Bay near the entrance to Golden Gate. Across the bay we see the hills of the Tiburon Peninsula and beyond that looms the peak of Angel Island. In the distance and across San Francisco the buildings of downtown Oakland are visible through the low level backlit morning haze. Beyond are the East Bay Hills and the furthest peak is Mount Diablo, all the way out past Concord.
The San Francisco Bay and the haze covered East Bay beyond the waters of Richardson Bay.
When I headed over the Golden Gate on this early February winter morning I intended to end up photographing redwoods or along the coast north of San Francisco in the morning before heading south to go back home by midday. I ended up getting distracted by very interesting shooting conditions in the Marin Headlands of the Golden Gate National Recreation Area and by the time I finished there I didn’t have enough remaining time to carry through on my original plans. But I did have a little time left, so I headed up to this spot along a ridge above Marin City where I know of a great view out over Richardson Bay, the Tiburon Peninsula, Angel Island, the Bay, past fog-shrouded Oakland, and on to the East Bay Hills.
This is a long lens landscape shot, for several reasons. First, the somewhat longer lens – though 159mm isn’t all that long – compresses distance a bit, both bringing Oakland’s downtown buildings a bit “closer” and foreshortening the very large distances a bit. It also lets me “edit” out some potentially distracting elements close to my shooting position and limit the scope of the image to just those elements that I wanted to include.
Photographer and visual opportunist. Daily photos since 2005, plus articles, reviews, news, and ideas.
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