Market Street Railway (Part 1 here) also restores the vintage cable cars that run San Francisco’s three cable routes. See the SF Cable Car site for details on those routes. Classic tourist shots of the cable cars include a car in front of 101 California, at the Powell Street turntable (Powell and Market), in Chinatown at California and Stockton, and at the top of Russian Hill on Hyde Street, with Alcatraz in the background (below).
A well-timed shot from high on California Street near the Mark Hopkins Hotel looking down into the financial district will impress friends back in Akron too. Mark Hopkins, incidentally, was a partner of Leland Stanford of the Central Pacific Railroad. Hopkins, C.P. Huntington, and Charles Crocker had giant mansions on Nob Hill where the California Street line runs. If you live here these views, impressive as they are, get old. At least photos of streetcars in the key locations do. Some more creative shooters catch cable cars cresting a hill backlit by a sunset.
I like to shoot them at night. It’s easy with a tripod. The 2.5 second shot below is at the end of Powell Street, near Market. It’s sweet - if you can get the peds out of the way. Pick a cold windy night, as long as your tripod is heavy-duty.
I tried the same thing at the end of the California Street line, but the lighting there is flat and boring. Laura and I spiced that up with a big No. 3 flashbulb (screw base, not an M3) just out of sight at camera right, aimed forward to highlight the right side of the car (actually there’s two cable cars end to end here – below).
The Powell Street turntable is also nice when it’s in motion. I’ve tried this with a flash at the end of the exposure, but prefer it with the ambient street light. 2 1/2 seconds at f/16:
I got my favorite shot of a cable car with a long (420 mm) lens looking up California Street from Market on a low-traffic night. The laws of physics (optics) impose some tough limitations on this sort of shot. Creating the illusion of a really steep hill in the background requires a very long lens. I used the longest one my budget allowed, 420mm. Depth of field is a problem with a long lens, and I wanted Nob Hill, about a mile away, and the cable car both to be in focus. According to the nifty Depth of Field calculator program I wrote for my mobile phone, it was impossible to get both in focus. With the cable car about 200 feet away and an f/32 lens, it is impossible to get both in focus. I also wanted a shutter speed of 30 seconds or less to avoid image noise. In engineering terms, this problem is overconstrained - four equations in three unknowns – it can’t be solved, it can only be optimized. Or in the words of the great engineer Mick Jagger, you can’t always get what you want but if you’re sufficiently nerdy, you might get close.
For my chosen ISO speed, f/22 was the smallest aperture I could use. The hyperfocal table for a 480mm lens told me that at f/22 I could focus out to about 300 feet and still get 200 feet in focus, so rather than focusing on the car I manually focused on something a bit farther away. As it turns out, the distant cars and their headlight trails on Nob Hill are still focused pretty well and the cable car is sharp. The first shot I took showed that the front of the cable car was way too dark. So flash it, right? The problem there is that a wimpy electronic flash is good for only a few feet at f/22 and my chosen film speed of ISO 100, despite the optimistic claims of Canon and Nikon. I used the strongest portable lighting I owned, Sylvania No. 3 flashbulbs made in the 1960s. These single-use bulbs pop about 30 times brighter than an electronic flash. The 30 second exposure time left plenty of time to walk up to the car and flash it twice at close range.
Market Street Railway publishes a calendar every year with photos of the vintage streetcars. It sells in the SF Railway Museum at the south end of Ferry Plaza and in local stores. Most of their photos come from hobby photographers like you. Many of mine have appeared there over the years. I spoke with MSR’s president, Rick Laubscher, yesterday and he said they’ve made the photo submittal process painless. You merely post photos to the Market Street Railway Flickr Group and tag them with “msrcalendarsubmission.” Submitting quality work will help raise funds for MSR’s non-profit work preserving this fabulous historic fleet.
California Street line at Stockton
Has any of your trolley car photos appeared in postcards? Seems like if the tourists like the calendar, they’d love them as post cards. I would anyway. I love these shots!
Outstanding nighttime photography! I am going to copy to my pictures at Flicker alphasurfer24 and will retain them unless I hear from you to the contrary.
I am a long time streetcar rider having taken my first trip at about 7 on the W car line of the Los Angeles Railroad. The fare was 7 cents as I recall.
I rode the LARR up until I graduated high school in 1950 and then for a couple of years the Pacific Electric Burbank lines while going to junior college.
I was in San Francisco last summer and rode the Embarcadero line with all of its “antique” streetcars. I rode the Cable Cars from near my hotel on Van Ness to Fisherman wharf, Powel Street, and did not use my car for the entire time I was there.
Thank you for sharing you outstanding photos, your skill is far beyond me.