Tech Info: Nikon D90 with 18-105mm lens @26mm, ISO 400, f8 for 1/500 sec.
Some of my Bangalore friends had made a visit to CA over work assignments. Of course the weekends were reserved for sight seeing and I joined them for a SFO tour. Till date, I hadn’t been to SFO that much, other than visiting known places like Golden Gate and the wharf. So I tagged along with them to get first hand experience of driving around SF.
One of them also has photography as his hobby which made it very clear that we were going to stop at places where we could snap away to glory 🙂 The other two didn’t put up a fight and were happy to tag along. First stop was at fisherman’s wharf. We used that to grab a quick lunch too. Next we headed to Coit Tower. I hadn’t even heard of this place before and kept searching for “Quite Tower” in the GPS. Finally somebody got the address and only when we reached that place, did I realize that its “Coit Tower” and not “Quite Tower” as I had assumed 😛
The Tower is about 210 feet (64m) on top of the telegraph hills. Its named after a woman Lillie Hitchcock Coit who was a firefighter. There is an elevator which takes you on top for a small entrance fee. Once you reach on top, the view of SF skyline is just gorgeous. Since tripod wasn’t allowed, this had to be done hand-held. Before I took this shot, I knew that it had to be in B&W and processing it wasn’t that much of an effort. A simple B&W conversion and it was all done.
Another shot that I do have in mind is to get the skyline during the blue hour. That may not be possible as the tower is closed after 5 PM. I’m not sure what days or even how many days are there in a calendar year to get the blue hour before 5PM. So I’ll have to check for other vantage points around this tower to get that kind of a shot.
don't know about abt hand-held but at a height of 210 feet my legs would sure be shaking…btw was this taken in b/w or did u later convert it to b/w? because I think I can see some hint of color in the snap or is it my post-lunch eyes playing trick on me?
@Sudip: The pics loose the color information if they are set to B&W in the camera itself, yeah I know it sounds odd, but you need all the color information you can get and later covert to B&W in post. In this one, its not a straight conversion, so that small hint of color is there in the pic.