Story of a Shot: The Golden Gate Bridge in fog

One feature I hope to make a regular occurrence on this blog is "Story of a Shot," which isn't just a picture and the technical aspects of that shot, but the story of how the picture came to be.  The first installment is going to talk about the shot that started my interest in the artistry of photography, which is the shot above, taken Friday September 23, 2011 at 4:16 PM Pacific Daylight Time.

Technical details

Camera: Nikon Coolpix 9100 (Point and Shoot)
ISO 800, f/9.0, 1/1250 sec.

Of course, the camera was in auto mode at the time.

I shouldn't even be here!

I wasn't even supposed to be in San Francisco that afternoon!  About two months before this, my colleagues had been working on setting up a training with a company in San Jose.  Originally, it was supposed to be a 5 day training, but the company wanted it during a week that I wasn't available on Monday; due to the content of the training, I was the only person who could deliver the class.  So we proposed two options to the customer: a cut down 4 day version of the training during that week in August or move the training to September when I could give all 5 days.  The customer selected the September 5 day version...or so we thought.  It turns out when I arrived, I start by showing the 5 day outline and of course I get lots of questions saying they were expecting a 4 day training.  D'oh!  Several of the students were traveling that Friday so we had to do the 4 day version, and it was cheaper for me to stay an extra day rather than change my flight back on such short notice.  An extra day in the Bay Area?  Darn.

Driving up to San Francisco

I needed to be in Oakland by 5:30 PM or so to meet a friend for dinner.  I've done the San Jose to San Francisco drive many times, usually on I-280, which is a beautiful drive in its own right, but since I had all day, I decided to take the long way there by heading to the coast and driving up the Pacific Coast Highway:

http://goo.gl/maps/2fz8y

There were of course plenty of great pictures from the drive like these:

A sign on a rest area on I-280

Once on the Pacific Coast Highway, the drive was like this--in and out of fog

A Taco Bell you can walk to directly from the beach in Pacifica!

Can you feel the excitement coming?

At the Vista Point

By the time I got through San Francisco and crossed the Golden Gate Bridge, it was around 3:30.  I was originally planning to drive straight to Oakland but I was ahead of schedule and so I stopped at the Vista Point just after the bridge and saw one of the weirdest things I'd ever seen:  fog pouring into the San Francisco Bay from the Pacific Ocean.  (All these pictures were from the same Nikon Coolpix S9100 camera set in auto mode.)

Fog was moving from right to left across the bridge

This is where the fog was coming from

Of course, if you were looking in a different direction from the same Vista Point, there was no fog at all!

San Francisco across the Bay from the Vista Point, or at least what you can see of it.

I knew I wasn't satisfied with the shot of the bridge on the left above, and I saw people on top of the hill, so I figured out how to get up there thanks to a map on the Vista Point.  That's where I got this shot:

When I got back from the trip and posted these to Facebook, I actually said this was my favorite shot as I liked how the curve of the suspension cables and the bridge tower look like they're coming out of the hill.  But then as people started "liking" my pictures, this one was the most liked:

This is, of course, the shot this entire post is about, and as I mentioned before, this is the shot that ended up getting the ball rolling on my love of photography.  I wasn't even trying to take this shot; I just happened to. But it's just so San Francisco with the fog and the bridge standing through it all.  I also love how this photo and really all the photos I took that day tell a story, a story of a drive I wasn't even supposed to to take, but like so many times in my life, God put me on for a reason, even if I had no clue at the time what that was. (Heck, I still don't know where the journey leads, but I know God is putting me on a good one!)

By the way, if you want to see all the pictures from that trip, here they are:

https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.10150842774250160.746340.785065159&type=1&l=8d56c3355a

This should work whether you're on Facebook or not.

Welcome to my blog!

Welcome to The Nervous Photographer! This blog is dedicated to my adventures in photography.  In particular, I'm an "NF" personality type (INFJ to be exact), which means in some sense that I can be an emotional person and that I often, though not nearly as much as I'd like, understand my and other people's emotions and why we do what we do. So this blog will be both about the technical side of photography and also about the emotional side of it, especially my emotions. And of course it will feature photos. Now a bit about me.

How did I get into photography?

I've been traveling for work since 2005, but I only occasionally took pictures at first; I didn't even get my first digital camera until the end of 2006. At that point, it was more about snapshots; for me, true photography started with the photo of the Golden Gate bridge you see in the background of this blog and just below this paragraph, taken September 23, 2011.

I'll tell the story of this shot later, but it was looking over the photos I took that day that something sparked in me. This in particular feels like San Francisco to me. There's fog, but cars are still going through and people aren't letting it get in their way. That's so like San Francisco; between geographical challenges, not exactly pristine weather, and earthquake fault lines, they built one of the most beautiful cities in the US. This is one thing I long to do with photography; I want to tell stories like this and capture some of the beauty God has placed in this world.

Shortly after taking those photos in San Francisco, I got fed up with my point and shoot and when it stopped working entirely, I decided to go headfirst and get my first DSLR, the Canon Rebel T3i, in April of 2012. I also took a class on things like ISO, aperture value, and shutter speed, and then it was time to get to work. I'll be writing more about my photography history after getting a DSLR as time goes on.

What makes me nervous about photography?

Why is this blog called The Nervous Photographer? Well, it's certainly not because I get nervous every time I press the shutter button. It's more about the fact that I'm an engineer and have always valued precision. Things have a right or wrong answer; either the cell phone network works or it doesn't. Photography is a jolt to the other side of my brain which has always wanted more time, but I've pushed it down because of the lack of precision. And that's what makes me nervous about this hobby--how do I know if my photos are doing justice to the beauty I see? Can I really trust a "feel?" Can I trust my "feel" to be "good enough?" What does that even mean? I also get nervous about where this hobby may be going in my life--will it be more than a hobby? How much time should I put into this while still doing my job as unto the Lord, running a board game group, and other things? I've never been good at the concept of moderation; once I commit to something, I go headlong into it. Maybe I should just enjoy the ride. I hope you'll enjoy it with me!