Click the image above to enter a 360° image that will allow you to take a look around this beach, see the Mile Rock Lighthouse and the Golden Gate Bridge.
A plague of the modern digital photography era is that sometimes it takes years before we go through images on our cards, even those shot in spectacular places. In the old days, we’d shoot our film, hand off for processing, and have our images to hold in our hands and stick in an album. Digital allows us to take more images, allows us to experiment and immediately see results, decide what we want to print or process digitally and then store on a hard drive. Or we store the images until sometime later when we have free time to look through them to begin with. At the time the photos on this page were taken, my free time was taking images. Every now and again, I would take a quick look and Save For Web a few that stood out, to send as postcards to friends, but the immediate gratification of shooting was the experience of a hike, being outdoors, taking time to experience a place.
This is Mile Rock Beach in San Francisco. I love the coastal trail in the Lands End Park and this wonderful little beach that descends from it is a lovely place to spend some time.
The Mile Rock Lighthouse sits on a rock in the mouth of the bay. Built in 1906, it’s anchored in place by 1500 tons of steel and concrete.
Around a headland towards the bay peeks the Golden Gate Bridge.
I love this place at sunset and sunrise. Sunset is more rushed, since dark is beginning to descend, it’s a long path back to civilization, and this is something women are constantly considering as they move through this world. Sunset colours behind the huge boulders that point to the open Pacific Ocean make it worth lingering and then making the very fast walk out to streets with traffic and people, but one day, it would be nice to have company on this walk so that I can linger, take my time both here and on the way out. There are some fabulous views along the trail, including the one below. I would’ve loved to have set up my tripod, because look at those lights on the bridge, with lingering pinks in the sky! But there was no one around, and it was moments away from pitch black and still quite a walk to go. This was handheld at 1/30 sec, 300 mm. Far from a perfect shot, but it does serve as a reminder of something I’m aiming to do better at some point. Life goals and all.
Edit: Ha! Sometimes we get busy and forget to ponder a moment. I took the above image in burst mode, to increase my chance at a sharp image. Because I was shooting at a fast enough ISO, with a VR lens, most were sharp, albeit very grainy, as I shot for the lights on the bridge, not the scene. A trick to know with digital images is that the grain doesn’t appear in the same spot on each image. So…the more images you can blend, the less grain you’ll end up with. I took 7 images into Photoshop and placed them in a stack. I selected all the images and did an Auto-Align Layers, cropped as necessary. I turned the stack into a smart object, then applied a Layer/Smart Object/Stack Mode/Median (you can also try Mean) to reduce noise. Et voila. A much improved image. Still some grain, but liveable grain, not hideous grain.
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