I took this photo on the very last day of my trip to Northern California. Normally, when I travel back from California, I take the early morning flight and land in Montreal in the evening. At some point, I realized that by traveling during the day I miss the entire day of shooting, including the sunrise and the sunset. This time I booked very last red-eye from San Francisco, and as a result, I had an extra day of shooting in the city. I was rewarded with a warm and sunny day with beautiful clouds in the evening.
Loc: 37.809788, -122.476202
Shooting
I was at Fort Point, which is located in very close proximity to the Golden Gate Bridge. In order to convey the scale of the scene, I used a wide angle lens (10mm) and used the road and the fence as leading lines to the focal point of the composition: the Golden Gate Bridge.
Processing
The processing was pretty straight forward; I used Photoshop HDR Pro to merge 3 bracketed exposures to HDR. The main challenge was the final cleaning. In order to remove any distractions from the scene, I had to mask the entire family from the grass (see original images below), the big bird, the guy and the car in the background and the fire hydrant.
Deconstructing Featured Photo
- Camera: Sony a6000
- Lens: Sony 10-18 mm
- Focal Length: 10mm
- ISO: 100
- Aperture: F8
- Bracketing: 3 shots ( -2, 0, +2)
- Tripod: FEISOL Tournament CT-3442 – Check my FEISOL Tournament CT-3442 Review.
- Ballhead: FEISOL CB-40D
