I tried once before early last year looking south but wasn't really happy with the results. The bridge was too bright to get long enough exposures to go with the stars. But after practicing with my post processing techniques and getting a new Nikon that has a sensor with the dynamic range to not blow out the highlights while keeping shadow details I figured it was time for another go at it.
I waited for a moonless, clear night (and Miranda's permission) and set off for a night alone with the bridge. When I pulled in there was a good crowd at the Battery Spencer overlook for the sunset. So I went back down to the base of the bridge to kill some time.
I'm still not sure how I like this view. Maybe I'll try again but with a tighter composition. After 45 minutes here I headed up top and had the place mostly to myself.
I wanted a view of the whole deck of the bridge. So I brought my 9 foot tall tripod and set it up to shoot over the chain link security fence, up the path from the normal photo area.
I like the headlight trails running all the way to the bottom corner and was really surprised that the light on the TransAmerica building came on for about a minute in the middle of my shooting. But the star trails weren't long enough to be really exciting. Also the chain link fence I was shooting over showed up enough in the bottom right corner to be distracting. I did a quick but ugly clone job to clean it up in the final image. As I was packing up I poked around and found that shooting from the top, where the fence line heads down the cliff face, helped keep the fence from showing up in the shots. Knowing there was a better view to be had was going to force me to return and do it better.
On the way home I made a quick stop in Sausalito on a hunch from a view I'd seen on the way in. I circled around a bit, found a hidden parking spot, and climbed down to the water's edge under a freeway overpass. Alcatraz lined up perfectly with the Bay Bridge and its new lights. Though it was windy out, the water here was just calm enough to get some nicely colored reflections.
A few nights later I trekked down again, determined to double the star trail lengths and get that fence out of my shot. Here's the better angle with 1.5 hours of trails.
The construction lights on the SF side and TA building weren't lit like last time. But work crews coming and going beneath the bridge made some cool headlights trails under the north section.
While that camera was running I set up two other cameras at the regular photo spot to see how that view looked with star trails. One horizontal
and one vertical
Both of these were shot with my Canon cameras which don't handle the mix of bright lights and dark skies as well as the Nikon. So at the end of the star trail shooting I took two extra photos, one exposed for the highlights on the bridge, then another at f/16. The small aperture creates the starburst effect on the bridge lights. Since the star trails process is spent blending 100-200 photos together (and considering the time spent erasing plane trails from those 100-200 images) blending in those last two photos didn't add much time to the process. I'm glad I included them as they really did a lot to improve the quality of the final images.
I'm pretty happy with how these turned out. But I still think the star trails need to be longer to make the image really dynamic. I did a quick calculation that 5 hours would get enough trails going from the horizon to the top of the photo to make it look complete. Might as well pull an all-nighter, I guess. Don't know if I'm that dedicated, though.
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