Transamerica Pyramid

This is a vertical panoramic photo of the Transamerica Pyramid, the most prominent skyscraper in downtown San Francisco. The city is famous for this distinctive building in it’s skyline, the pyramid shape can easily be spotted from even a great distance away.

The building is 853 ft high which, according to Wikipedia, makes it the 100th tallest building in the world. I took this photo one night this week from Telegraph Hill, looking across from just below Coit Tower.

Apparently there used to be an observation deck for visitors high up in the building providing magnificent views of San Francisco and the bay. Unfortunately this was closed after the Sept 11 terrorist attacks but there are now cameras installed where the observation deck used to be and visitors can view and control the cameras from the building lobby to look around from up high.

I created this image by stitching together three separate full size photos. This created an extremely large file with lots of detail suitable for creating a large printout, but was far too large to display on the web so I had to scale it down to display here.

To get a better look, click on the image to view the photo in the gallery. From there you may scroll down to see a larger version of the photo with more detail. You may also view this and other photos in my flickr gallery.

Pedestrian Entrance, Golden Gate Bridge

I usually wouldn’t take a photo like this with all the cluttered signs, fences, etc. in the way, but in this case I’m glad I did! This is the pedestrian/bike entrance to the Golden Gate Bridge on the San Francisco side. The bridge walkways are closed at 9pm each night and are patrolled by police officers on bicycles. The bridge apparently has a terrible record for suicides – people jumping off the bridge – can you imagine?!?

I used HDR to create this image from 3 different exposure shots. It allowed me to capture both the glow of the bridge in the background, and the soft lighting in the background hills of Sausalito and the foreground signs without the traffic sign (“2 Lanes”) being completely overexposed.

View it large on black

I like how it turned out, do you? Leave a comment and let me know what you think.

I’ve been looking for a place recently to experiment taking photos of trailing lights from traffic at night. I took this photo last night at the Golden Gate Bridge toll booths (on the San Francisco side of the bridge).

View it large on black (looks much better!)

One of the neat things about these shots is every shot can look very different depending on what the cars passing by do. I had a shot with more interesting taillight patterns (a driver swerved across several lanes), but I chose this one as the best. I really liked the yellow and blue in the oncoming traffic and also that you can see the ghost image of a car stopping briefly to pay cash in one of the booths.

Here’s another version of the shot, with all the lights completely blurred out. I took this one just for fun.

PS – I’m discovering that I really enjoy night photography, more night photos coming soon!

This is a night shot I took last weekend of the Ferry Building and nearby waterfront in San Francisco. The skyscrapers are part of the downtown financial district. Coit Tower is also visible at the far right of the picture. You can also view a larger version.

While I like this picture, the highlights and neon signs are still a little more blown out than I’d prefer. I hope to get back to this location to try again for better results soon.