All images © 2007-2013 Aaron Meyers
I always love looking at the San Francisco skyline. There’s 2 beautiful bridges, a nice arrangement of short and tall buildings, a baseball park, the Ferry Building, and then the Transamerica Beacon to cap it all off. During the holidays the Embarcadero Center outlines their buildings with white lights. When the SF Giants are in the World Series, however, the entire city turns itself orange in support of their baseball team. During game 2 of the 2014 World Series, Willie, Alan, and I met in Oakland to photograph the orange skyline. We had hoped some clouds might roll in but things were looking very hit-or-miss on the drive to Oakland. Willie and I arrived extra early after severely overestimating the amount of traffic we would hit (we hit none). Turns out that our worries about sunset were pointless because the sky literally exploded with color for almost an hour. The sky turned into a giant orange color just as the Giants scored their first run in the game. As the game progressed the sky turned to an rangy-pink, red, and then an hour later, when we left, still had remnants of red in the sky. For the record, the purple tint to the left side of the water was caused by some lights from the Oakland pier. I remember Willie and Alan saying “whah, the water looks purple over here” as we were packing up. Shooting here turned out to be much more difficult than we had expected due to some crazy wind. Shutter speeds had to be kept shorter to ensure sharpness. Anything longer to blur the water and the lens would shake in the wind :( Nikon D800 w/Nikkor 80-200mm f/2.8: 170mm, f/13, 1.3 sec, ISO 640 6 images stitched and cropped to 58 megapixels
I’m a night person and spend most of my nights editing photos till the wee hours of dawn. I like to get a few hours of sleep, wake up, and get to work. I don’t usually shoot sunrises because living on the west coast means we face the wrong direction for sunrise. Many mornings during the winter I do wake-up early though, to see if there’s low fog at the Golden Gate Bridge. On this particular morning I went to bed early knowing that I’d be getting up before sunrise, not for the fog, but because there would be a gorgeous sunrise in the morning. The GGB actually provides a perfect backdrop as it faces east when you drive through SF and into the Marin Headlands. A number of photographers were in place at Kirby Cove when Willie and I arrived and we had fun running around like crazy chickens trying to find rocks and different angles to use as foreground elements. The Golden Gate Bridge provides a perfect setting for the golden clouds that Mama Nature graced us with. Before the sun came up too high the city lights add to the beautiful morning! Nikon D800 w/Nikkor 17-35mm f/2.8: 19mm, f/5.6, 5.0 sec, ISO 320 3 photo focus stack w/various shutter speeds
