Category: Golden Gate

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Black and White Golden Gate Lightroom Nik Software Photography Photography - Black & White Photography - Canon 5D Mark II San Francisco/California

New Year’s Day 2012 at the Golden Gate

New Year's Day - San Francisco - 2012

In what’s become sort of a tradition for me, on New Year’s Day I head for the Golden Gate and see what I can find to start the new year off right.

Today, my favorite venue was blocked by construction fencing – so I headed to my next favorite venue – Baker Beach. I happened to arrive just as the California Hornblower sailed under the Golden Gate Bridge.

This image was shot in RAW with my Canon 5D Mark II and then processed tonight in Photoshop using Nik’s Color Efex Pro 4 and Silver Efex Pro 2 before importing into Lightroom 3 for final cropping (16:9), toning, sharpening and noise reduction.

There were a lot of people enjoying Baker Beach when I shot the original image – but they were removed using the content-aware healing brush in Photoshop CS5 – yielding this final image. I’m sure they don’t mind! 😉

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Black and White Golden Gate Photography Photography - Canon PowerShot S95 San Francisco/California

Sail Away – San Francisco – 2011

Socked In - San Francisco - 2011

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Yesterday, I headed north to Sausalito to join the Marin Photo Club’s charter boat heading out onto San Francisco Bay for the Blue Angels air show performance.

Coming north across the Golden Gate Bridge, the fog was still blowing through and under the bridge and created this lovely view toward the skyline of San Francisco. I shot this using my tiny Canon PowerShot S95 – handheld – from the View Point on the north side of the bridge.

When I noticed the sailboat in the image, I decided to post-process it a bit – using curves and masks in Photoshop CS5 to isolate adjustments in the sky/skyline, the fog, and the water/sailboat at the bottom of the image. A final curves layer added the toning – tweaking the blue and green colors just a bit.

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Golden Gate Nik Software Photography San Francisco/California

The Golden Gate Bridge at Sunrise

Golden Gate Sunrise - 2007

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As I’ve been learning new post-processing techniques (mostly the Nik and Topaz filters in Photoshop), I’ve been having some fun going back and working with older images – mostly not shot in RAW and, as a result, I’m not post-processing them as HDRs.

As I was reviewing my older images, this one caught my eye mostly because of the juxtaposition of the rock in the lower left and the lone tree up on the hill on the right. Plus, the light is lovely too and, in this case, the usual boring blue sky actually works nicely against the International Orange paint of the bridge itself.

This particular sunrise image of the Golden Gate Bridge was taken using my original DSLR, a Canon 30D, in March 2007 – almost five years ago. I used Nik’s Viveza and Topaz’s Adjust and Simplify to create this version. Simplify, in particular, is a new tool I’ve been learning – and, in this case, just a bit of Simplify helped smooth out the dirt and grassy areas of the image very nicely. The result, no surprise, is a bit simpler than the original which seems more pleasing to my eye.

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Golden Gate Photography Photography - Black & White Photomatix Pro San Francisco/California

The Golden Gate from Fort Baker

Golden Gate from Fort Baker by Scott Loftesness

I seem to be in a bit of a North Bay rut! Here’s another black and white image from the Marin County perspective north of San Francisco. This is the Golden Gate Bridge from Fort Baker, a truly delightful – and usually lightly visited – spot on the north side of the Golden Gate. Click on the image to see the light boxed version.

You get some unusual perspectives from this location – of both the bridge and also of The City itself (see this wonderful nighttime shot of The City that my friend Doug Kaye took from Fort Baker during a full moon recently). Behind me when I was taking this shot is Carvallo Point, a very pleasant lodge and restaurant (Murray Circle) that uses many of the old buildings from Fort Baker as its rooms.

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Golden Gate Photography Photography - Canon PowerShot S90 San Francisco/California Textures

The Golden Gate – in Texture

Golden Gate

Here’s another of my experiments in adding textures to an image. This image is a texturized version of this original shot below taken on January 1, 2010 at Baker Beach in San Francisco using my tiny Canon PowerShot S90.

Golden Gate

I also tweaked the image a bit to make the bridge towers more vertical – and then applied the Purple Prose texture from French Kiss Textures. This particular texture has script elements on the left side of the image – and I thought those elements worked well into the sky and mountain area on the left side of the bridge itself.

I love how the texture adds dimension to the image – making it much more interesting to my eye as I want to explore it for longer than just the original image. For me, that’s the power of adding textures – making the image much more interesting and something you want to spend time exploring – similar to how a great painting captures your eye and mind.

For more examples of my texture experiments, see this image of the Palace of Fine Arts in San Francisco, this image of the FV Point Reyes aground at Inverness, and these early experiments in blue and gold texturized images of San Francisco taken from Fort Point.

Palace of Fine Arts - San Francisco   FV Point Reyes aground at Inverness   San Francisco - Jan 1, 2010   San Francisco - Jan 1, 2010

If you’re interested in textures, here are some resources I’ve found very helpful:

Are there others? Yourself? Tell me about them in the comments below!