San Francisco Bay Area Photography

One early morning on the way to Monterey, I stopped for a brief moment of enjoyment at Golden Gate National Recreation Area.  Sun was slowly rising over the beautiful stretch of nature off Highway 280.

I took this shot of Golden Gate Bridge and Richmond, San Francisco, under the bridge back in March.  Though windy, the air wasn’t all that clear for a March evening.  Lighting, however, was too good to pass up the opportunity to take a couple of shots.  Those shots proved to be worth-while as I spent another hour or so to get this below shot.

I spent quite a bit of time trying to reduce the noise level in the picture – but in the end, left the image mostly untouched.  The deep blue sky is a product of white balance adjustment – the sodium vapor lights on the bridge was bright, harsh and ugly and the color temperature was brought down to soften the sodium vapor lighting.

Taken with Nikon D300, Nikkor 35-70mm F/2.8D, F/10, 15 seconds, aperture priority, spot metering, ISO 200, 14-bit color, post processed with Nikon Capture NX.

I had an opportunity to test an image stitching software called Quickage by i2k.  I took two shots from Gerstle Park in San Rafael looking over the Richmond Bridge, using moon as the focal point and overlapping it in those shot, about a year ago.

I’ve tried a few stitching software to make a panorama view and wasn’t happy with the result until I tried Quickage.

Here is my initial impression:

Strength:

• clean, easiest interface – pick two or more pictures and click a button
• excellent job maintaining the picture integrity – very little loss of sharpness
• seemless integration and cropping

Weakness:

• very limited options over the image – no editing capability
• reads/saves jpeg or tiff file only

I’ll experiment more with this software as the quality of the output is certainly good enough.

As per agreement (just honest review and links), here is the link to the company site and Quickage:

http://www.i2align.com/

http://www.i2align.com/photographic_panorama_montage_software.php

This is a shot taken at Curry Village in June, 2008, at dusk.  It’s an operating post office with Half Dome in the background.

A shot of old building at Presidio Yacht Club, located at old military site called Fort Baker, at night time.  For more information, here is the link to the website – Presidio Yacht Club

Frigid, foggy air makes a walk at the beach almost unbearable when I found an artist working away.  I don’t know how long she has been painting in this bitter cold day. . .

This is a life in Northern California.