Wandering the dark mid-level tiers of Fort Point in the shadow of the Golden Gate Bridge I came upon a window without glass. This is the same window I photographed a couple of years back with dirty glass and a happy face. The photo below shows the span of the Golden Gate through the open window, and the bottom photo shows the bottom of one of the towers.

There was, of course, a dynamic range problem with these images. Even given the inherent dynamic range within RAW captures, I needed to take separate exposures for the scene through the window and the embrasures themselves. It’s important when combining images to extend the dyamic range to maintain the same f-stop in the images, so I shot both sets of exposures stopped down to f/22 to create a high depth-of-field effect in the foregrounds. There’s a twenty times difference in shutter speed between the exposure for the inside of the window and the exposures for the brighter Golden Gate span.

I used Liquid Mask to quickly pop out the window from the versions shot for the distance so I could slide it on top of the versions exposed for the window frame.

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Speaking of the Golden Gate, if you are in the Bay area, I will be making a presentation about 100 Views of the Golden Gate on Sunday, July 27 at 2PM at Book Passage in the San Francisco Ferry Building (more info about the event). I’ll discuss the artistic connection with Hokusai and Japanese art and ideas, the aesthetic and spiritual dimensions of the bridge, the landscape of the Golden Gate in the context of the Bay area, and some of the photo techniques I used during the years I made the photos in this book.

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[Both images: Photoshop composites of two exposures at 1/20 of a second and at 1 second, Nikon D300, 18-200VR Zoom lens, f/22 and ISO 100, tripod mounted. Top image shot at 29mm (44.5mm in 35mm terms), image above shot at 22mm (33mm in 35mm terms).]