A Saturday Shooting San Francisco

This time of year – with the remnants of late winter storms and clouds – is a great time to head up to San Francisco for some photography. We’ve had unsettled weather yesterday and today – so this morning I headed across the Golden Gate to the Marin Headlands to see how things looked.

I also had a new lens along helping to motivate my quest – a Canon 24-105MM f4 L IS USM Zoom. (Whew, that’s a mouthful!) Most of my shooting to date has been either using Tamron zooms (17-50mm f2.8 or the 18-200mm f3.5-6.3) or a handful of Canon prime lenses (28mm f1.8, 50mm f1.4, or the 85mm f1.8).

This new lens is my first in the Canon L series – which Canon aficionados come to respect at a distance from the red line around the lens barrel! It’s all about “the glass.” For today’s shooting, the new “glass” was mounted on my Canon 40D.

After heading across the bridge and touring the Marin Headlands out to Point Bonita and back through the one lane tunnel, I ended up in Sausalito for lunch. A quick “Golden Gate Special” sandwich at the Golden Gate Market filled the hunger and then I walked down a block along the waterfront and took these views across the water towards San Francisco.

Chris Honeysett has taken a wonderful shot from this same location – but with much better technique (e.g., using a very slow shutter speed to blur the water, shooting from the beach not the boardwalk, and doing it at high tide and in deep fog!)!

I’ve uploaded today’s pictures to Flickr here. The smaller sizes I uploaded naturally look a bit darker than the actual full size shots – but the light today was also challenging – shooting back into the Sun much of the time. I had a -1/3 exposure correction cranked in which also contributed to the darker exposures.

After reviewing and adjusting today’s shots (using Apple Aperture 2.0 which I’m finding works really well for my needs), I decided to spring for the Canon Circular Polarizer for the new lens to help out in the future with this kind of challenging sun-lighting situation.

I look forward to repeating this effort either in the next couple of weeks this year – or maybe we’ll have to wait for stormy season again next year.