Yahacts Oregon and an image of the Golden Gate Bridge

On Sunday evening, I checked into my hotel in San Francisco and rushed off to get some shots of the Golden Gate Bridge. Since it was a foggy evening, I know it had the potential to render some great images and I wasn't disappointed.

The trick with an iconic image like the Golden Gate Bridge is light. The world is full of great images of the bridge and in my opinion, none of them are shot in the middle of the day when there are no clouds, fog or lights to add mood to the image. To get a great image of the bridge, you have to be here at what is known as the golden hour which is about 30 minutes before sunset until at least 30 minutes after sunset. The fog is really a bonus as it softens the lights of the bridge and causes reflections to glow. In this case, I got here about two hours early, picked a spot that I felt was right and composed the shot in camera. Then, I moved the camera, changed the composition and switched lens about 25 times so that I could look like a real pro to the tourists standing around. Once I was satisfied, I sat down on a park bench with a good book and waited for the right light. It's not hard to get an image like this, you just have to be patient and be able to know what good light is and how to capture it in camera.

Once the lights on the bridge started coming on, I started to pay attention to the fog patterns and pressed the shutter every time it looked interesting. Basically, I'm looking for balance here. With the piers of th bridge positioned at each end of the picture, I wanted the bulk of the fog to collect around the piers which eventually happened. You'll need a tripod for this kind of shot because long exposures are required. In this case, the image was shot at 200 ISO at F13 for 4 seconds. This image was under exposed by about 2 1/2 stops so that the blue in the sky would oversaturate the image and make the light glow a little better.

If you want more detail on this image, send me an email and I'll be glad to help. I'm in Yahacts Oregon right now and I'm going to try and capture a similar image of the Haceta Head lighthouse tonight so, I'll post the results in a few days.