Pre-Dawn Golden Gate Passage

As I was hunting around for objects to rest my camera on in lieu of the tripod I'd forgotten to pack, (See previous post) I noticed a container ship heading into the bay. I knew that it would be hard to capture in the early morning light. I finally found a wooden recycling box on the edge of the lookout area that had a decent vantage point. Meanwhile, the area was really starting to fill up with photographers eager to catch the sunrise over the bay. Some had vintage cameras or an assortment of fancy gear. All had tripods and I was envious... But, with the camera resting on the box and steadied by my hand, I clicked away several "brackets" of shots to merge using HDR techniques. Here is the final compsition.

 

Golden Rays Through the Gate

We took a trip down to the San Francisco bay area for Christmas this year. We stayed North of the City in the small but charming town of Petaluma. The last full day of the trip, we got up very early and decided to take the 30-45 minute drive down to a lookout area on the Northwest side of the Golden Gate bridge for sunrise. I somehow managed to forget to pack my tripod for this trip which I seriously regret. It didn't stop me from taking photos, but did limit what I was able to do. I had to find solid objects I could rest and stabilize the camera on for longer exposures. Even then, it was a challenge. I did come away with two shots I really like. The first one, posted here, is a little after sunrise. We had started back down the hill after shooting some wider shots from higher up. I noticed the way the sun's rays were shining through the North tower of the bridge and we stopped to snap a few more pictures. I believe I was resting the camera on a park bench for this shot. I'll post the second photo later this week!

Car Show

On Saturday, the "DARE to Cruise for CASA" car show took place in downtown Albany. I'm not a huge car person, but I do like seeing classic or cool and unusual cars. I dropped in for about an hour or so to check them out and take some pictures. Here is a picture of a Cobra that I liked. The rest of the car show pictures should be up on Flickr soon.

4th of July in Albany

I went downtown to catch the fireworks display on the waterfront in Albany. The area was packed. My plan was to take shots of the fireworks from some distance away on the Ellsworth st. bridge. A number of people were also there to watch the show and a few others with cameras and tripods. I staked out a spot with about 30 minutes to go. I didn't want to carry too much gear out on the bridge so I only brought one lens with me. As it turned out, It wasn't quite wide enough to capture exactly the shot I wanted, but I got close. Most of the exposures are in the 5-6 second range. I used some pseudo HDR techniques to enhance them where possible and I ended up with about 5 shots that I'm pretty happy with. Here is one of them.

Mordor

On our camping trip in Eastern Oregon, we went rock hounding in a place called Succor Creek. With the storm starting to move in that would later threaten our camp site with high winds, the sides of the canyon reminded me of the fictional Mordor from Lord of the Rings.