Sean Raymond Photography aka ShutterKrazy's photostream  

This is another comp of the sunrise earlier this week that I took. This is a very different shot that I have ever gotten from here, not only did I get the sun coming up within the upper opening of the North Tower but...Mother Nature...and SF smog created a type of smokey ND lens for me. Because there was so much particulate between the sunrise in Oakland and the city it acted like sunglasses blocking most of the sun and creating this bright orange ball in the sky without the intense brightness. This allowed me to still capture the city outline and the bridge in the foreground!

Hope you all had a great weekend!

OK now that Darvin has figured out the link between the image and the title and I have a second I'll explain the picture. Below is the image that triggered a mad dash down the hills of the Marin Headlands. As you can see SF yesterday was very hazy and socked in with a brown layer of YUCK! I had planned on capturing the Point Bonita lighthouse with the near full moon dropping behind it but as I went up to Hawk hill to see everything I noticed that the visibility from up there was very poor and were I was going to shoot was even further away to line everything up so I called the shot a no go...So, after getting up at 4am to get to SF before sunrise what do you do....punt.....

There were no really great clouds gathered above and I didn't feel like "going down the hills" so I tired to set up and see what the sun would look like through the haze as it came up. As soon as I saw a crescent of the sun....I grabbed a shot and thought....the position and the filtered sunlight....I bet if a changed my perspective I could catch the sun coming up through the upper hole in the North tower...so I grabbed my camera and tripod and ran down the main road continually stopping to see if I could line things up...and I did...so I set everything down made some setting changes and focus and started firing.....the thing is that the Sun and Moon move incredible fast when contrasted agains earthly objects! I kept picking everything up and moving about 10 -20 feet down the road every min or so to keep thing lined up...then when the arc was gone...I tried to get the sun above the tower between the lights like a field goal...which also worked...then I had to get into my car and drive to a completely different location further under the support because the sun had risen to high for the angles to work!

The benefit was that I was closer to the bridge but....the D of F compression I was getting at 300mm from where I was now substantially reduced!

When I got home and started looking through all the shots....this one jumped out at me...my Daughter say me playing with the crop marque and suggested a VERY tight cut....this reminded me of my kid and Star Trek days as the talking portal, on one of the most famous original series episodes "City on the Edge of Forever".

The angled darker area in the keyhole is actually the Oakland Hills that the sun is coming up behind...Remember I'm on a small sensor and using by 70-300mm so I'm getting a multiplication even greater and compressing the heck out of the depth of field! There is even a small bird in the keyhole to the left....it just all fell together...once again dumb luck and timing!!! This is NOT an HDR automatic or hand done...no panoramas...nothing but a decent shot with a few tweaks in Lightroom 3....it was a few seconds and whale this is what I got..."that was easy"!

Hope you guys are all surviving the week!

Happy shooting!

Yet another view of the city and the bridge from my hike down the hill. There were not a lot of clouds but the one's that were there lit up nicely!

This is a 4 image hand done HDR from my hike down the hillside, in my attempt to "get to a different location" and get a view that is unique, from all the pull out shots from the road above.

This is the nearly completely frozen upper Eagle Falls in Emerald Bay in Lake Tahoe. I had to climb down the steep cliff next to it and had rope and repelling harness on just in case I slipped. There was ice everywhere and 3 days before I had been here and they were taking a man down in a gurney with a broken let who had fallen just walking the trails to Eagle Lake!

Eagle Falls consists of an upper and lower falls. The upper section shown here is 58' high. The unique thing about this shot is that there is NO snow anywhere......California is experiencing it's worst December for rain in Years! One of the only great things about this is that if there was snow...you couldn't differentiate it from the Frozen waterfall...this way all that you see....is ICE lots and lots of it!!! The falls is still going on under the ice...you can hear it and you can see it moving under areas of ice which look magical. The falls also is open at the bottom and this is where I took the other Black and White of the falls that I posted earlier.

I have to admit right now this is NOT a single snap by any means....it's a set of 3 bracketed images from 48 images. Once these primary 3 bracketed images were completed I also used the individual images where needed as patches for detail. I took extra pictures at the bottom of the image at different focal lengths so I could get as much as I could in sharp focus.

The sun you see at the top of the falls is all the sun that got on this hillside all day...it was actually so dark that everything....I mean EVERYTHING was blue the ice, the rocks, me....it was 28 degrees that day when I first go there!!! I had several layers to really get the image right. With this image I really felt more like an artist than a photographer adjusting by hand the images, the lighting and shadows with the different exposures...but...it was fun...the first file size was over 8GB..which was whittled down to around 1.9GB....the size is HUGE Photoshop says that it is 284.1Mega Pixel image so it should print large "well"!

I will post a cropped part of the image later to show the insane detail.

Hope you all had a GREAT Weekend!