Yesterday I’d seen several views of the Golden Gate Bridge with a fantastic wave of fog rolling in, obscuring the bridge itself but low enough that the towers were peeking through, and hoped it would last until I could head over there in the evening. By the time I got moving across the Bay Bridge, however, the fog was completely gone.
I stopped off at Treasure Island to have a look at the latest progress on the Bay Bridge and then drove around Treasure Island for a while, just to see if anything caught my eye. I felt that if I resumed a trip to the Golden Gate Bridge I would find light similar to previous visits, and I’d really had my heart set on fog.
So I picked a spot on the island and decided to write the evening off to just watching what would happen. Maybe I’d learn something that would come in handy later. As the sun dropped I started taking some test shots to record what the city looked like from an unfamiliar vantage point. I noticed the fog reappear as the sun turned from white to orange, and I kicked myself for not making the rest of the drive to the Golden Gate. There was no way I could make it at this point before the light disappeared, though.
So I toughed it out and keep shooting every once in a while. Then something amazing started to happen. Rays of orange light started to grow up from the horizon, like inverted rays that we sometimes see through clouds. I have no idea what caused this, if the fog or clouds were more intense off the coast and filtered the sunlight way beyond the horizon, or if some other explanation might be responsible. I started shooting like mad at this point, because I’d never seen light like this before. As I worked, I had a thought that struck me as utterly of the digital age: no one is going to believe this isn’t Photoshopped.
To be honest, there is some Photoshop work here, because to get the rays and the fog encroaching on Alcatraz to look as they did, I had to combine two layers made at different exposures (see below). If only digital cameras were as sophisticated as the human eye! But the rays coming up from the horizon are as I saw them (okay, with a few spots from dust on the lens removed). I was very glad I’d stayed where I was and not chased the fog all the way to the Golden Gate. And right now I’m wondering if YOU can see the lights rays clearly on your monitor, or if my painstaking technique in making this photograph is only visible on my system…
Info: This photograph was made with a Nikon D700 Digital SLR Camera
