Golden Sunrise, San Francisco

Posted by Gary Hart (California, United States) on 2 April 2009 in Cityscape & Urban and Portfolio.

I try to avoid anything manmade in my images, but I make an exception where San Francisco's concerned. "The City" (that's what we call it out here, with no apologies to "The Big Apple," which gets first choice in most everything else) has so many long established beautiful vistas that it feels almost natural anyway.

I took this from my favorite spot to photograph San Francisco, the Marin Headlands, immediately north of the Golden Gate (the bridge was named for this narrow passage between San Francisco Bay and the Pacific Ocean, not the other way around). There are many great views along the headlands road, but I particularly like this spot because it's the only place I can line up the GGB North Tower and Transamerica Pyramid.

This is a sunrise shot, intentionally underexposed to emphasize the shape of the bridge and bring out the color in the sky. Because I was shooting toward the rising sun, exposing to bring out color and detail in the bridge would have completely blown out the sky. This silhouette approach is something I encourage my workshop students to try when we're confronted with a backlit sunrise scene--sometimes the only way to deal with the bright sky is to find a shape that stands out against the sky and make the image about the object's shape. Finding a shape to silhouette can sometimes be difficult, but that certainly isn't a problem here.

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