I've been in San Francisco for two months now and still haven't had the time to do some of the cliché photos everyone does around here. So, there you have them.
How were these images taken?
This evening, I was heading home on a slightly different commute route and had dug my nose deep in my phone, answering an email or something. I looked up and saw the sunset colors over the bay from the train window. Immediately got off at the next stop, happy that for once I actually carried my camera around, and almost ran for the waterfront. No tripod though, so the railing had to do. The weird wooden thing served great as foreground and Bay Bridge provided a nice leading line. I snapped three bracketed shots careful not to shake on the uneven railing surface too much. And then I turned around:
Yep, while I was looking at the quiet bay side, all the action was going on much closer to the city, in the direction of the Embarcadero. The railing could still work for a reasonable composition here after a small crop, but no luck with the next one, which I had to do hand-held. Everything lasted not more than 2-3 minutes after which the light was gone.
I started walking away thinking that in about 80 hours I'll be finishing a marathon at that exact spot and that it will look completely different once it's packed with several thousand people. Once back, I didn't spend a lot of time post-processing. Just blending the bracketed images and minor corrections to the composition. The vibe was chill-out, the likes of Telepopmusik - Just Breathe. Oh, when processing, I also had to remove the nasty spots that I get on every image after I dropped my camera in lake Washington -- dried water droplets on the matrix, I guess.
Ok, it would be cruel to leave you thinking about dried water on a CMOS image sensor. So, here's another typical San Francisco image. Golden gate bridge near dark. This was from a trip trying to get the 4th of July fireworks.
Beautiful.
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