Posts in Category: Landmark
Golden Gate | San Francisco, CA
You have to love work trips (at least, I usually don’t mind them as long as they don’t happen TOO often) – most expenses paid for and usually nothing expected of you past 5 PM. Unexpectedly, I had the opportunity to be in the Bay Area this past week and couldn’t find any reason not to head up to the Golden Gate Bridge. I packed my camera, borrowed a co-worker’s rental car, and after a few quick stops to visit some friends in Oakland, I got to Fort Baker right around 11 PM. I couldn’t have asked for a more perfect, crisp night – no clouds, no fog, stars overhead, the twinkling of downtown San Francisco and the Bay Bridge off to the left, and the Golden Gate Bridge towering overhead on the right.
Fort Baker is located on the Sausalito (NE) side of the bridge – the only side of the bridge Katie and I didn’t visit last time we were in San Francisco (August 2013). If you drive through the Fort grounds, there’s a long lookout/docking/fishing pier off of Moore Road/Conzleman Road that I would highly recommend for a serene vantage point of the bridge at night. The pier is pretty isolated, as you can only get to it from one direction. I spent about an hour and a half on or around the pier, taking pictures, walking along the shore, and absorbing the scenery. For a little while, I decided to just sit on the pier with my legs hanging over – a dolphin swam by a few times blowing air upwards, a few boats went past in the distance, a coyote actually walked out onto the pier but got scared away by the flashlight of a couple (pictured below) who was on the pier too doing some midnight fishing. An awesome fusion of nature and architecture, as if the surrounding area was unphased and unaffected by this massive feat of engineering and humanity. The sound of cars driving past on the bridge and the waves lapping against the rocks below my feet. An evening I won’t forget for the rest of my life.
P.S. For you technical folks, most of these were taken at 15, 20, or 30 second exposures at ISO 200 and an aperture set somewhere between f/4 and f/9.
Pennybacker Bridge | Austin, Texas
It’s been a while since I’ve done any HDR photography (which is simply a method of combining multiple bracketed images to create one image with a larger dynamic range than a normal photograph), but I just couldn’t help myself a few nights ago. As I’ve mentioned previously, I can’t stand when people use HDR to create some ridiculously phony looking picture (Google it), but that’s just personal preference. I like to utilize it in a minimal way to effectively re-create the image as I remember my eyes seeing it, since our eyes have significantly higher dynamic range than our cameras. Hopefully I was able to do that here. This is the Pennybacker Bridge – the portion of Capital of Texas Highway 360 that spans Lake Austin. You can see the skyscrapers of the Austin skyline peeking out over the horizon just to the left of the bridge in each photo. Enjoy!
Capitol Sunset
I know that it’s been too long since I’ve posted on the blog when I need to update 6 of my plugins and WordPress itself when I sign back in. Sorry about that folks. Anyways, I posted one picture from this set on my Facebook fan page (if you’re not a fan yet, you can click “Like” at that link) and on Twitter earlier this month, but there were several others that I thought I should share.
A little background behind this set of images: my wife was out of town, I was bored, so I decided to go take pictures of the Capitol in the sunset from the roof of a parking garage near I-35 in Austin. Obviously, I wasn’t allowed on top of said parking garage, since it’s part of a medical complex near campus, but it took about an hour before the inevitable security guard came trotting out to give me the boot. In the meantime, I took these pictures! Hope you enjoy this unique view of the Capitol – I haven’t seen many other photos from this angle. And yes, I had to end it with the classic “burnt orange” sky.
