A few days ago, after work, I headed over to both the Yerba Buena Island and Treasure Island to meet up with some friends (Joe Ercoli, Tom Finale, Paul Giani, … Continue reading Good Times on the Islands
Tag: Bay Area
Progress on the Bay Bridge
I’ll be going out to Yerba Buena Island today after work to take some photos of the Bay Bridge. I’ve been wanting to take pictures of both the San Francisco span and Oakland span of the Bay Bridge ever since I posted pictures of the bridge on this blog. Joe Ercoli, Tom Finale, James Perez, Paul Giani, Jorman Koon, and I will be making the trek around the island. This time I’ll be taking my GoPro HERO2 and a POS Canon PowerShot ELPH 100 HS since I no longer have my Canon Rebel XSi.
With the GoPro, I’m going to attempt to do a time lapse of the sun setting in the west with the San Francisco Bay Bridge span in the foreground. I haven’t had the chance to pick up the LCD Back for the GoPro so I’ll be shooting blind, technically. I’ve played around with the GoPro enough that I have an idea of what I’ll be capturing.
Once the sun set, we’ll be heading to the east end of the island to take shots of the Oakland span that has both the new Bay Bridge and current Bay Bridge section. There has been a lot of progress done to the new span of the bridge since the last time that I was there on Yerba Buena Island. The bridge now have cables hanging down from the main cable.
The photo above was taken from an ACTransit bus as I was heading to the East Bay. So as you can tell from the Google Map photo from the very top of this post, that when compared to the Instagram photo above, there has been a ton of progress on the new span.
I plan on shooting the Oakland span with the POS Canon. I’m worried about the quality of photos that I’ll get. I hope that it wont be a waste of time trying to shoot with the POS. Actually, I know it wont be a true waste of time since I’ll be seeing friends that I haven’t seen in few months. I do know that the POS is not a DSLR and that the quality will not be as good.
We are just have to stay tuned to see how everything turned out. So stay tuned. Maybe if time permits I’ll post something from tonight’s photo adventure later early tomorrow morning.
A Palace for the World’s Fair
I took advantage of being off this past Thursday by going out shooting with my brother James and my friend Jorman. We spent that afternoon going to several places taking shots of iconic structures of San Francisco, one of them being the Palace of Fine Arts.
Built in 1915, nine years after the devastation 1906 earthquake, San Francisco was back on its feet and wanted to show the world how it well the city was doing by holding the The Panama-Pacific International Exposition (PPIE), World’s Fair, for the opening of the Panama Canal. There were plenty of magnificent structures that were built for the event such as the Palace of Horticulture and the Tower of Jewels. Sadly, like all World’s Fair, these great structures were only temporary. From all the grandeur of the PPIE, the only structure that remains is the Palace of Fine Arts.
Below is a panorama of the Palace of Fine Arts where you can see people enjoying the day and appreciating the spectacle before their eyes.
The Palace of Fine Arts received a long overdue restoration that was completed in 2011. Some of the things that came with the face lift was the removal of the inset faces from under the dome of the rotunda. Pun intended, even though the pun was corny.
To help give you an idea to how massive the rotunda is, I took a photo of a couple folks within the rotunda as they were going about shooting photos. The way I was able to take this photo was ever so gently scaling the steps up till I was a good 15′ – 20′ above the ground.
The steps that I scaled are actually planters and at the time of taking the photo, there were no plants within the planters.
James took a picture of me while I started my decent back down, then posted the image on Instagram. As you can see the urns are approximately 10′ tall, making me appear diminutive.
The landscaping is done so wonderful throughout the area for the Palace of Fine Arts. I am not a horticulturalist so I can’t name all the plants that surrounds the area, but the flowers, shrubs, and trees sure do compliment the areas and make the Palace of Fine Arts complete.
The Redwood Trees that grow on the grounds of the Palace of Fine Arts grow along side of the columns so naturally that they appear to be a part of the structure. The branches and leaves of the Redwood works well with the Corinthians capitals of the columns.
Finally, a great feature of the Palace of Fine Arts is that the lagoon creates a tranquility to the space around it that brings in wildlife. The various wildlife that makes the Palace of Fine Arts their home ranges from ducks, swans, turtles, frogs, and many more. I had a great opportunity to shoot a few of the swans while we all were walking around taking photos.
I can’t wait till I come back to the Palace of Fine Arts to snap some photos of this place. Next time I’ll do some HDR and/or Time Lapse. And once the weather cools down and the fog stops being a constant, I’ll have a chance to shoot the Palace of Fine arts at night for the first time.
Please leave any comments, feed back, negativity, positive stuff, and what nots about my post, grammar, photo skills, poor post production editing, and story telling skills since I am trying to be a better blogger, photographer, writer, and person.
Thanks!
The Bay Bridge
It’s amazing how foggy San Francisco is right now. The fog is thick and damp as it covers the City while the rest of the Bay Area is trying to survive a heat wave.
This time last year, the fog was the same. I remember that the City was foggy last year because a few friends (Tom Finale, Joe Ercoli, and Paul Giani) came up to the city to do a photo shoot last August. You can see the photo from that photo shoot here. After the shoot, we had dinner and talked about what iconic landmarks should we shoot while in the City. Palace of Fine Arts, Legion of Honor, Golden Gate Bridge, Coit Tower, Lombard Street, and many more were name dropped. The only problem those landmarks that night was the fog. Since the fog comes from the west, we decided to try our luck east. We ended up at the San Francisco’s end of the Bay Bridge.
The fog was present but light. The look on the faces of my fellow photographers showed misery but yet we made the most of the night. We ended up shooting the Raygun Gothic Rocket, the Bay Bridge, and other stuff that I don’t remember. Below is the shot of the Bay Bridge that I got from that night.
I’d love to shoot the San Francisco’s end of the Bay Bridge again but on a more clearer night. In fact, there are a lot of places that I still have not had a chance to shoot. We’ll see how the rest of this year goes and how much shooting I get done.
As for now, I need to take advantage of the fog and learn how to work with it as many photo ops are not going to be set in ideal conditions.
New Seats
Looks like BART is trying out some new upholstery in their trains. The new material appears to be made of vinyl to it to help repel soiling, rather than the existing canvas seats.
I’m glad that BART is finally replacing their old worn upholstery. We’ll see how these seats hold up over time.
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