Photographer’s Guide to the Golden Gate Bridge, Part 3

Photographer’s Guide to the Golden Gate Bridge, Part 3 – Langdon Court and Merchant Road
(see intro/pt 1 and part 2)

Both these locations are at the level of the Golden Gate Bridge, near the toll gate. You can drive to both locations and park. One half hour after sunset, the bridge from the parking lot at the end of Langdon Court is a great shot all year. The main issue is tuning your white balance to trade between a blue sky and a red bridge. Since the sky is lit by natural light and the bridge and ocean are lit by incandescent lighting, you’ll need to make artistic decisions about color. If you show in RAW, you can obviously delay the white-balance choice til processing time. Otherwise white-balance bracketing makes sense, since it’s tough to color accurately on the small LCD display of a digital camera. As a starting point, note that a tungsten white balance (or tungsten film) on a clear night will result in an accurate bridge color but a sky that is way too blue for most tastes. In framing this photo, be conscious of the weeds and wild fennel that will try to enter the bottom right edge of the photo. You can decide whether to include them or not, but you might not notice them through a viewfinder in the dark.

The first two shots are from Langdon Court. The first, from the north end of the parking lot, uses Daylight white balance. The second, from a bit farther south, is partway between daylight and tungsten.

Access – from San Francisco, take the last San Francisco northbound exit off Highway 101, just before the bridge. The exit sign reads “Golden Gate National Recreation Area View Area”. At the stop sign turn right (Vista Access Road) and then in 150 feet another right at the next stop sign, Lincoln Blvd. Follow Lincoln Blvd for .26 miles (past the stop sign at Merchant Road) and turn right on Langdon Court. Follow Langdon Ct. through the paved parking lot and then around the left side of the old military structure to a gravel parking lot. This photo was taken from the northwest corner of the parking lot. The edge of the parking lot is no more than 20 feet from the top of the steep slope down to Baker Beach. Be careful not to fall off the edge in the dark.

Traveling southbound, proceed through the far right toll lane #1 (west side). Take an immediate right exiting Highway 101. Continue through the stop sign on Merchant Road. At the next stop sign turn right on Lincoln Blvd and an immediate right onto Langdon Court and continue as described above.

Map view

The Merchant Road shot works in all sorts of weather. Since traffic helps the slow shutter shots, shoot at rush hour to get a lot of brake and tail lights. Adjust aperture and film speed to get the right exposure time for the traffic speed. Five seconds is a good place to start. Too long an exposure and the traffic can disappear altogether. Follow the directions below to a point where you can set a tripod to line up the north and south towers of the bridge nearly perfectly. I used a large tripod fully extended to get above the vegetation.

A major spoiler of this type of photo is ghosting – the appearance of phantom headlights and street lights at a position symmetrically opposite of the actual light source in the image. These come from surface reflections in front of the lens aperture. Lens makers try to prevent the problem by multi-coating the glass surfaces inside the lens and using several types of glass with different indices of refraction. Lens filters, regardless of their claims of being multicoated greatly increase the ghosts in this type of photo so I don’t use them.

Merchant Road Access – from San Francisco, take the last San Francisco northbound exit off Highway 101, just before the bridge. The exit sign reads “Golden Gate National Recreation Area View Area”. At the stop sign turn right (Vista Access Road) and then in 150 feet another right at the next stop sign, Lincoln Blvd. Follow Lincoln Blvd for .25 miles to the stop sign at Merchant Road. Turn right on Merchant Road and go about a tenth of a mile to a dirt parking lot on the left (northwest) side of Merchant Road. Battery Godfrey will be in front of you. At this point there is a small hill (with a roadcut from the previous path of Merchant Road in it) that will get you up another 15 feet so you can look straight down the bridge roadway.

Traveling southbound, use the far right toll lane #1 (west side). Take an immediate right exiting Highway 101. Continue through the stop sign on Merchant Road. Follow Merchant Road about .1 miles and park at the parking lot on the right side of the road just before it curves to the left.

Map view