The Golden Bay

The last week or so has been busy. The taxman. The book. The sling. All things that have been soaking up every free moment. But yesterday, as I started yet another trip to the bay area, I slipped off an overcrowded Bay Bridge and watched the sunset from Treasure Island, not far from where I camped out a month ago. It was a cloudless day, but there was a slight bit of marine layer on the bay and a bit of wind. Combined with a setting sun, everything went golden.

I started off taking shots of various boats, but then I watched one particular sailboat go cross in front of Alcatraz and saw an opportunity. A minute or two later, I made this photograph:

Shooting right at the sun can be a really stupid thing to do. You don’t want to be doing this with your eye up to the view finder. All those glass elements will do a great job of focusing that sunlight down and probably burn something important off your retina. In days past, you’d shoot this kind of shot by barely looking in one edge of your viewfinder and seeing if your focus point was on the right thing, trying all the while not to hurt yourself. These days, we have live view. I still forget that it’s there too often, however. I didn’t start using it till about half way through my shooting.

There’s something else I want to note. This is the kind of shot that auto white balance will usually suck the life out of. I ended up going with a color temperature of 4850 in Lightroom to give the scene a rich golden flavor.

On reviewing the resulting photographs, one thing that surprised me was how much distortion there was in the air from the movement of the wind and heat. This closeup of the sailboat where you can see a total lack of straight lines.

Shooting details: Nikon D700, Nikkor 70-200 f/2.8G VR at 200mm. 1/4000@f/5.6, ISO 200. But, more important than equipment is being in the right place at the right time.