Photographer’s Guide to the Golden Gate Bridge, Part 2

Photographer’s Guide to the Golden Gate Bridge, Part 2 – Battery Spencer and Conzelman Road
(see intro and pt 1)

Both these locations are in the Marin Headlands just north of the Golden Gate Bridge. The first is close to the north tower. From San Francisco, cross the bridge on US 101. The return trip will cost $5. Exit at Alexander Road, the second exit north of the bridge. At the stop sign turn left onto Sausalito Lateral Rd., passing under US 101. The road name then changes to Conzelman Rd. Follow Conzelman Rd. about 0.4 miles up the hill to the small Battery Spencer parking area. Walk out the gravel path to Battery Spencer, a site built to guard the coast in the late 1800s.

A wide-angle lens emphasizes the length of the bridge – about 1.5 miles, with 4000 feet between the towers. The shorter the lens the greater the difference in apparent size of the two towers. It’s great at night with a short lens. In daylight it’s the classic tourist shot – not the most dramatic treatment of the bridge, so it benefits from interesting weather. Fortunately, this spot very often has interesting weather. The cloud condition shown below (2nd photo) occurs on most summer afternoons. It happens when air near the ground in inland California heats up during the day, and then begins to rise, pulling moist air from the Pacific over the bay and onto the mainland. A more interesting effect occurs when the fog is low and dense, leaving only the towers poking through. You seldom have to wait long for some ship traffic through the Golden Gate. Intensity of the  “International Orange” color of the bridge varies depending on how long since it was last painted. Even a new paint job can look surprisingly washed-out at midday.

Drive up Conzelman Road another 3/4 mile to use San Francisco as a backdrop.  The scene is best when the sky is blue and clear over Oakland Hills, most common in autumn and winter. Clouds settle east of the bay on hot summer days, turning the scene gray and bland. The first composition below places the Transamerica Building in the window in the north tower of the Golden Gate Bridge, either cool or trite, depending on your point of view. If you don’t want this setup, you should still be conscious of the alignment to avoid having part of the Transamerica tower peaking around the edge of the bridge tower.

A bit farther down the hill on Conzelman Road (closer to Battery Spencer), you can place a few large San Francisco buildings left of the bridge’s north tower, but the nearby hillside will appear in the photo. In December or early January the Embarcadero Center buildings is outlined in Christmas lights. Both photos work by contrasting a large foreground bridge against small (in the image) background buildings.

Image sharpness really matters for this type of photo. A lens in the 300 to 400 mm range (based on full frame sensor) works best. In the below photo the bridge is about 4000 feet from the camera, and the city is over five miles away. Even at f/2.8, a 400 mm lens, focused on the bridge would render the city in focus, so chose an aperture for this shot based on lens sharpness, steadiness of tripod in the wind, and long-exposure image noise in digital cameras. Most telephoto lenses are at the peak sharpness two stops down from maximum aperture. I opted for the aperture giving maximum lens sharpness, which resulted in a 6-second exposure, which I felt showed acceptably low noise.

In the second shot below, the north tower is only about 2000 feet away. Using standard depth of field calculations, a 400 mm lens would need to be stopped down to at least f/7.1 for the buildings to be sharp if you focus on the tower.

The major obstacle to all these shots is wind. Your tripod needs to be tall enough to clear the hillside’s ground cover. Even professional tripods with good heads (no play in the hinges or ball joint) will move visibly in the ever-present evening wind on Conzelman Road. After getting a lot of blurry shots, I started hanging a 20 pound weight from my tripod’s center stem to hold it still. Tire chains work well too.