A story by Nathaniel Young.
Most people spend New Year's Eve celebrating and staying up late to celebrate the new year. I had other ideas. The next morning my dad and I woke up really early and made the hour long drive to Battery Spencer overlooking the Golden Gate Bridge from the north side. After he parked the car, we walked on the trail through the fort with our phone flashlights; the sense of awe and amazement grew as we walked up the stairs to the viewpoint. I could feel the anticipation and excitement building as 20 or so other people were also standing here with their tripods and cameras to ring in this first sunrise of the new year.
I quickly setup my tripod and camera; then after I tweaked my composition, I came out with this photo. The soft pink and purple hues in the sky were so pretty. The car light trails crossing the Golden Gate Bridge and the city lights of San Francisco in the distant at this time were amazing to see too. The cold and calm atmosphere was amazing, and the water almost looked frozen. The colors, light, and view from this morning were all so good from this breathtaking location. This photo was taken about 40 minutes before sunrise, and a whole hour before the sun came out from behind the clouds.
After I got the first photo, I decided to move my tripod to the right side of the view area so that I could have more of the colorful light in the sky in my image. I used an application on my phone called PhotoPills that overlays the location of the sun over time over a live feed from my phone's camera; I used this information to determine that I should move my camera to the right to include more of the scenery left of the bridge. After I settled on this new composition, I let my camera click away for a timelapse as the light changed.
The photo above is one of the many photos that I took during the timelapse. Since I’m doing more timelapses, I am using ways to speed up the process of shooting my photos with speed and efficiency while not compromising on quality. This means setting my camera in Aperture Priority mode as the light is changing while locked at its base ISO; this allows me more time to focus on composition rather than exposure settings. It was so pretty to watch the sky light up with the soft pink and yellow colors as the environment brightened up. The view was breathtaking, the colors in the sky was amazing, my photos were looking good, my timelapse was going well, but then it wasn't. About 30 minutes into my timelapse, I got a heart attack as my camera said it had an error reading my SD card. I clicked through the settings, and the camera said it had successfully recovered the image database. I felt relieved, and continued on with my timelapse. However a minute later, my camera gave me the same error again, and this time my luck was not so good. My camera said it could not recover the image database. At that time, I decided it was best to just turn my camera off and hope that somehow I could recover all my photos from my SD card back at home at my computer. I was feeling disappointed that all of the best color and light from this scenery was gone, and that this morning was a waste. It was still before the sun had risen, and luckily I had brought a second camera on this trip. On a side note, the reason why I brought the Sony a6000 with me on this trip as a second camera was because of its 1.5 times crop factor which would turn the telephoto lens at 200mm to an effective 300mm lens on a 35mm sensor. This means that I could zoom in closer to the moon, and it was also the day before the supermoon which means that the moon was already extra big in the sky. However, I did not get any pictures of the moon as it set behind the Marin Headlands in the opposite direction we were facing. Anyway, I took a few photos of the same composition since I assumed that all my previous photos taken that morning were lost. Then, we decided that it was not worth it to stay at this location any longer because we were already here for over 40 minutes, and the best light of this location had already passed.
So after we left Battery Spencer, we decided we still wanted to go for a hike. I remembered from looking at Google Maps (sometime before the trip) that there was a trail that led up the side of the hill to Slackers Hill, so my dad and I decided that to do that instead of driving the car somewhere else. So we walked on the walkway along the side of the road to get to the trail which leads up to Slackers Hill. This trail called the SCA Trail is not an easy trail to hike up as it is pretty steep since it goes up the side of the hill. As we were not even half way up the hill, I turned around and noticed the sun finally coming out from behind the low clouds and fog. Then, my dad and I decided to make a run for it up the hill (all while carrying the tripods, cameras, lenses, stabilizers, water, etc.). After running through a number of switchbacks on the trail and looking at how much further we needed to go to reach to top of the hill, I figured that the sun would already be too far above the horizon once we reached the top of Slackers Hill. So, I quickly swapped lenses, then setup my camera and tripod in a clearing along the trail to get the shot seen above.
I only had one working camera at this time, and its 1.5 times crop proved to be very useful in getting this shot. It allowed me to really compress the scene and fill the frame with the subjects. This photo captures the sun rising behind the five tallest skyscrapers in San Francisco – all located in the Financial District. The buildings from left to right are: Transamerica Pyramid, 345 California Center, 181 Fremont, Salesforce Tower (just newly completed at the time), and 555 California Street. I love how the fog creates a layer in the foreground of the composition with the building tops just sticking out above it, and the soft colors from the sunrise are really pretty. For this photo, I took 5 different exposures from 1/100 seconds to 1/4000 seconds to exposure properly for the buildings and the sun. I then blended them all together using luminosity masks in Photoshop after I made the basic color and exposure adjustments in Lightroom. Overall, I am super happy with the amount of detail captured in the highlights of this final photo. I also have to say that this is my favorite image that I have ever taken at this point because of it's uniqueness. It shows the colorful light of sunrise and the tallest buildings of San Francisco engulfed it the fog. The fog and the color tones just really show the stunning atmospheric conditions that were present that morning.
After I had got the photo of the sun behind the skyscrapers of San Francisco and morning fog, my dad and I decided to take our time and finish our hike up to Slackers Hill. Once we got to the top, the view was rewarding although pretty hazy from the harsher sunlight and fog. We decided to have some fun and take a few photos together; after a while, we finally got a couple of ones that we liked as you can see above.
You might also be still wondering what happened to my corrupted SD card with all my photos from my Sony a7 II. Well, it turns out that to my surprise, all the photos were still there when I plugged my SD card into my computer. I didn't even have to retrieve them through some recovery software. After I copied all the photos off my SD card, I reformatted the SD card, and I haven't had a problem with it since.
Thank you for reading if you got this far; if you want to see more of my photos, you can find them on social media @nyoungstudios on: 500px, Instagram, and Facebook. If you have any questions about my photos, feel free to ask them over on one of those platforms.
Credits:
Nathaniel Young