Tag Archives: telegraph

Two Bridges and Fog, San Francisco Bay

Two Bridges and Fog, San Francisco Bay - Morning fog floats above the north end of the Golden Gate Bridge, San Francisco Bay, the Bay Bridge, and Yerba Buena Island.
Morning fog floats above the north end of the Golden Gate Bridge, San Francisco Bay, the Bay Bridge, and Yerba Buena Island.

Two Bridges and Fog, San Francisco Bay. San Francisco, California. July 14, 2011. © Copyright 2011 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

Morning fog floats above the north end of the Golden Gate Bridge, San Francisco Bay, the Bay Bridge, and Yerba Buena Island.

This is certainly not a unique viewpoint for photographing the Golden Gate (and the bridge named after it) and the rest of San Francisco Bay… but I keep returning anyway. While the principal physical elements of the scene – Marin headlands, bridge, the City, bridges, Yerba Buena Island, the East Bay – the conditions of light and atmosphere change constantly. The variations in the fog alone could be the subject of a book, I’m sure! It can come from the west (summer) or the east (winter), it can be high or low (or both at once!), thin or thick, opaque or luminous, static or moving quickly, illuminated by sun or by artificial light at night, and more.

On this morning it was a combination of several of those. There was a sort of thin fog/haze at the lower levels, but the thicker fog was quite high, above the bridge towers and even a bit above my position in the Marin headlands. The fog was beginning to break up, starting to the east and gradually moving westward toward the coast, and when I made this photograph large beams of diffused light were coming through the fog deck and lighting areas around the San Francisco waterfront and even on the bay waters. Lining up the elements of the photograph wasn’t terribly hard once I found the composition I liked, but then I waited for boats for move into or out of the frame (see a large freighter passing between towers of the distant Bay Bridge) and for the light to appear in (as close to) the right places (as one can hope for).

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.
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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.

Coit Tower, Fog

Coit Tower, Fog
Coit Tower, Fog

Coit Tower, Fog. San Francisco, California. December 16. 2010. © Copyright G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

Swirling fog and mist engulf San Francisco’s Coit Tower and Telegraph Hill.

One more in this series of photographs of the San Francisco waterfront and downtown areas in brightly back-lit, early morning conditions in which the City was nearly obscured by drifting fog. All of the photographs in the series were made from a location near the north end of the Golden Gate Bridge, just a bit up the road into the Marin Headlands. Like several of the others, this one was shot with a 400mm focal length lens, pointing almost directly in the direction of the rising sun. For some of the exposures I had to stand a couple feet in front of the camera, at the maximum extension of my remote release cable, and carefully position my hand to shade the front element of the lens.

Here the fog has almost completely obscured Coit Tower at the top of Telegraph Hill. If you look very carefully to the left of Coit Tower you can barely make out the ghostly image of the top of one of the towers of the San Francisco Oakland Bay Bridge. It was my good fortune that a slightly less opaque section of the drifting fog momentarily framed the summit of Telegraph Hill.

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.

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Public Stairway, Telegraph Hill

Public Stairway, Telegraph Hill

Public Stairway, Telegraph Hill. San Francisco, California. August 18, 2009. © Copyright G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

A public stairway ascends Telegraph Hill from downtown San Francisco, California.

Yes, I’m still extracting more photographs from my mid-August morning walking across a good portion of downtown San Francisco. After walking from the train station across Market and through the Chinatown area to North Beach, I wandered a bit around the latter neighborhood, eventually ended up in the Telegraph Hill area. While waiting for some traffic weirdness to pass I happened to look down a side street and catch a view back toward downtown buildings, so I wandered over that way and ended up going down this very steep “sidewalk” a bit.

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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