Details

Comments

This scene is most attractive when the sky is blue and clear over Oakland Hills. This can occur throughout the year, but is more common in autumn and winter. Clouds often settle east of the bay on hot summer days, and when they don't, a layer of haze is common. This composition involves sighting the Transamerica Building through the window in the north tower of the Golden Gate Bridge - an effect that is either cool or trite, depending on your point of view. In either case, you should be conscious of the alignment, and avoid having a portion of the Transamerica tower peaking around the edge of the bridge tower.

A bit farther down the hill on Conzulman Road, you can place a few large San Francisco buildings to the left of the bridge's north tower, but the nearby hillside will appear in the photo. If you shoot during December or early January, the Embarcadero Center buildings will be outlined in Christmas lights. Both photos work by contrasting a large foreground bridge against small (in the image) background buildings.

Image sharpness really matters for this type of shot. A lens in the 300 to 400 mm range works best. In the above photo the bridge is about 4000 feet from the camera, and the city is over five miles away. Even at f/2.8, a 400 mm lens, focused on the bridge would render the city in focus. So your selection of aperture for this shot should depend on lens sharpness, steadiness of tripod in the wind, and long-exposure image noise in digital cameras. Film cameras would instead require consideration of reciprocity failure. Most, but not all, telephoto lenses are at the peak sharpness two stops down from maximum aperture. Many of the newer digital cameras produce acceptably low noise with exposure times of 15 seconds or less. That being the case I opted for the aperture giving maximum lens sharpness, which resulted in a 6-second exposure, which I felt showed negligible noise.

In the shot below, the north tower is only about 2000 feet away. Using standard depth of field calculations, a 400 mm lens would need to be stopped down to at least f/7.1 to render the buildings sharp if you focus on the tower. With a 300 mm lens, f/4 will suffice.

The major obstacle to getting these shots is wind. Your tripod needs to be tall enough to clear the hillside's ground cover. Even full-sized professional tripods with good heads will move visibly in the evening wind that occurs almost every day. The LCD image on my digital camera showed obvious motion blur on about a dozen attempts at the above shot. I then hung a 20 pound weight from the tripod's center stem to hold it still. Even with this sort of rig, be sure to use a solid tripod head with no play in the hinges or ball joint.

Access

From San Francisco, cross the bridge on US 101. The return trip will cost $5. Exit at Alexander Road, the second exit north of the bridge. At the stop sign turn left onto Sausalito Lateral Rd., passing under US 101. The road name then changes to Conzulman Rd. Follow Conzulman Rd. about 1.5 miles up the hill, until the north tower aligns with the Transamerica Building, for the shot above. The photo below is from about 3/4 mile up hill from US 101.

Details