Some of the city’s finest.

There’s a reason you pay a premium to live in California. It’s more than repaid by the money saved on crashed cars, snow ploughs, medical costs from winter ills and the absence of rednecks.

I found myself in San Francisco noodling on such thoughts the other day with the weather beyond perfect. Clear skies, cool, no wind, lighting made for photography.

One of the indoor shopping malls in the city offers not one but two roof gardens, poorly advertised and known to few, yet affording fine views of the city. It’s the Galleria and you can find it here:

Crocker Galleria.

From the northern garden (the two are not connected so you have to traipse through the shopping mall to get from one to the other) you get a superb view of the Hobart Building, built in 1914 and still putting all around it to shame. Click on that landlord’s link and you too will conclude they should have retained me to take the picture of their building, for theirs could scarcely be worse:

G1, Olympus 9-18mm @ 11mm, perspective corrected in PS

Look down and you get a splendid panorama of that great thoroughfare that is Market Street with Post Street in the foreground:

G1, Olympus 9-18mm @ 9mm, distortion correction in LR3

Look the other way and you get a shyster broker and some splendid colors and shadows on Montgomery Street:

G1, Olympus 9-18mm @ 12mm

The southern roof garden of the Galleria offers a symphony of shapes, reflections and design:

G1, Olympus 9-18mm @ 15mm

The view through the Galleria’s glass roof is no less inspiring:

G1, Olympus 9-18mm @ 10mm. Lens profile correction applied in LR3.

The Olympus 9-18mm MFT lens on the Panasonic G1 is perfect for this sort of thing and you can see what I wrote about it by clicking here. Creating your own lens profiles for distortion correction on the G1 and its brethren was addressed here.

If there are better ways of spending a sunny day in a great city they may be found in Paris or Rome or Venice or Florence, but this is pretty close to as good as it gets. New York? Fughedaboutit.

On Highway One.

Go a few miles south of Carmel on California’s Highway One and you will reach a desolate windy stretch of the world’s most beautiful road to which abuts a rock which is home to the Point Sur lightstation.

It’s no exaggeration to say that I have been trying to take a half decent snap of this majestically situated relic for some two decades now. First, I can never resist the call of One and while I much prefer to take in that magical highway on a motorcycle, that form of conveyance is ill suited to carrying the sort of gear needed to do Point Sur justice.

On my most recent attempt I was actually visiting One to take some virtual reality panoramas at Point Lobos, just outside Carmel, but could not resist the short drive down to Big Sur, passing Point Sur en route.

The problem with photographing Point Sur is that it’s far away, the gates are always locked, you can’t get a good view of it from close-up, it’s windy as all get up and the place, when not shrouded in mist, is enveloped in sea haze. But this time I came prepared. With monopod and tripod and with that killer duo, the Canon 5D and the Canon 400mm f/5.6 L telephoto. The latter, while huge and unwieldy, is by a considerable margin the best 400mm lens I have used and will likely remain so because the next step up is Canon’s f/4 and f/2.8 variants and I have more sense than the money demanded for these.

To cut a long story short, I banged away from the roadside, over the fence, with the hardware neatly supported on a monopod, trying not to sway in the heavy wind. The long Canon lens does not make matters easier by offering a lot of barrel for the wind to push on. I left the lens fully open as it gets no sharper stopped down and because I wanted the shortest possible shutter speed at the optimal ISO 400 setting on the 5D’s grainless sensor. The image was made in RAW format, of course, as I knew a lot of post processing would be needed to bring up the tones and contrast, experience having taught me it is very hard to destroy the quality of a 5D RAW image no matter how much you tweak things.

Well, here she is. I can still do better and propose to spend another 20 years trying, but this will have to do for now. The camera was maybe a mile from the buildings.

Point Sur lighstation. Canon 5D, 400mm, 1/3000, f/5.6, ISO400, processed heavily in Lightroom 3.

Here’s the original – let me tell you that even with a monopod it’s a challenge holding this rig level in heavy wind.

Original.

To read more about Point Sur click here, bought to you by us California taxpayers who are largely refused entry to this special place.