Bay Sunset Silhouette, photo by Harold Davis. View this photo larger!

It’s hard to know how to frame the whole wide Bay. An extreme wide-angle, like this fish-eye shot, can be groovy. But it gives more of a sense of gimmick, or gadget, than of the wonder of the landscape.

There are five elements in the Bay landscape: the Bay, the sky, the city, the Golden Gate, and Mount Tam. A possibility is to stitch together a panormama. But single frame solutions can show the sky and water, and two of the remaining three (at least without obvious distortion). Even showing two of the three (San Francisco, the Golden Gate Bridge, and Mount Tamalpais) there’s still a compositional question about integrating the elements.

That’s why I like this photo I took the other evening, with the silhouetted tree between the Golden Gate and Mount Tamalpais making these parts of the landscape function in a compositionally interesting way.