San Francisco Bay Bridge

The Golden Gate Bridge was covered in fog when I visited San Francisco for the second time. It was unfortunate because it is unlikely I will ever return to it, unless another of my cousins gets married. In any case, I made good use of my tripod and speedlight this time, taking a night shot of the Bay Bridge on the north east side of San Francisco, viewed from the corner of Embarcadero and Howard St.

Here, one can see the bridge was poking into the clouds and the lights on the bridge were dispersed in the foggy atmosphere.


I started experimenting with flash options only on this trip to San Jose. At the wedding I was at on Saturday, I was trying to take pictures of people with city lights in the background. I knew if I had used the typical flash sync, the background would be virtually totally dark as the camera would not have captured enough of the ambient light. Shooting without flash means people have to stand still like a rock, an impossible feat. So then, I tried a mix: shooting without flash to capture the ambient and manually pop a flash to illuminate the subjects in the front. It worked but not too well -- parts of the subjects were translucent as I did not point the flash in the proper direction. I then thought about using slow-sync flash.

This is the result of a slow sync (front curtain) -- that is me standing in front of the Bay Bridge. The picture would be more interesting if I had stood a little more to the right but this photo is to show how the slow sync helped.