San Francisco Fisheye & Long Exposure
2013.01.26
Day One Hundred and Eleven. Went back up to SF to play some more with the still shiny and still quite new Fisheye lens and do more long exposure work. We started over by Horseshoe Bay, which provided an awesome view of the sunset over the Golden Gate Bridge. I always enjoy shooting from the Marin side. While over there, we made the trek up to Hawk Hill where, since I'd been there so much recently, decided to shoot a time-lapse of the sunset over the city. As always, I would have loved to shoot longer, but (a) everyone else was done, (b) it was getting cold, and (c) I was hungry (no surprise, I know). After the sun went down, we went back across to bridge to the Palace of Fine Arts, which is just an absolutely incredible building. I'm wowed by it every time I see it and it turned out to be especially fun to shoot with the fisheye. From there, we went to the usual spot by Rincon Park to shoot the Bay Bridge. I'm not really sure what I think of the couple shots I got of it with the fisheye. Since the point of a wide angle lens is not to get everything in but to see how close you can get, I started walking towards the bridge. The view got odder and odder as I got closer, until I found a magic spot between Pier 22 1/2 and Pier 24. It didn't turn out to be a magical spot for the fisheye, but I knew just by looking that as soon as I swapped it out for my trusty 28-300, the magic was going to happen. And sure enough, 28mm provided the perfect view. From there, we went across the bridge to Treasure Island and hiked back up the road a bit to a rather precarious ledge that provided an incredible view of the city. For as much as I know the fisheye is not for getting everything in, with it I was able to get Marin, the Golden Gate, San Francisco, and all of the Bay Bridge in one shot! Incredible! Then in my last shot, I got a near perfect shot of a plane on approach to land at SFO. It turned out to be a really awesome night :)
