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Golden Gate Bridge, Baker Beach and Marin Headlands |
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Bill Storage December 5, 2006 Notes: Some friends from out of town told me they wanted to get some good photos of the Golden Gate Bridge during their visit to San Francisco, so I offered to go with them down the steep trail to the north end of Baker Beach. The tide was extremely low, there was no wind, and consequently no waves to speak of. Below are some twilight/night shots done with a Canon 5D digital SLR camera. Night photography is one of the weakest aspects of digital imaging with current technology. I've included some of the technical details below. After experimenting with blurred seagulls and long lenses in the past, I find 1/25 to be my favorite shutter speed for this subject. With longer exposures, the birds tend to disappear altogether. The three small-wave close-ups show the effect of different long exposure times on roughly similar, small waves, all at the same location and focal length of 100 mm. The tanker on the bay presents some difficult choices. Because it is moving at about 10 mph, I wanted a short exposure time, and my maximum aperture was f/2.8. I experimented with different ISO ratings, trading ship motion blur for image noise. My favorite was at ISO 400. Note that there is still some visible motion blur and some image noise in the sky, but it is a usable image, and one that would probably have been unacceptable if recorded on ISO 400 35 mm slide film. A 200 mm f/1.8 lens would have been ideal, but I don't have one. By the way, on the subject of film grain vs. digital noise, I've done direct comparisons of the Langdon Court bridge shot with the Canon 5D and a Canon EOS film body using Fuji Provia, and I see less noise in the sky of this 10 second exposure than I see in my equivalent Provia shot. For more "how-to" details, see my Photographers' Guide to the Golden Gate Bridge. Email me about this page |
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| Copyright 2006 William Storage and Laura Maish. Updated 10/27/2007 |
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