Every Corner of the Bay Area
In my earlier days as a photographer, I focused almost exclusively on capturing landscapes in far-off places like Yosemite, Yellowstone, or the Grand Canyon. I didn’t give much thought to photographing near where I lived. It felt too familiar, too boring. That began to change when I picked up a copy of Galen Rowell’s book Bay Area Wild, which showcased the natural beauty within the San Francisco Bay Area, where I live. I marveled at his photographs of landscapes all within an hour or two from my house.
Like Rowell, I was surprised to learn of the uniqueness of the region’s abundant wildlands. Though it lacks any singular, world-renowned natural landmarks, the Bay Area makes up for it with a unique mix of both urban areas and extensive natural landscapes. Ever since I finished the book, I wanted to acquaint myself with every remote corner of the bay.
Last month, I found the perfect pretext. With much of the Sierra Nevada buried under hundreds of inches of snow after a record-breaking winter, I decided to make it my mission to explore every corner of the Bay Area in four weeks.
After some deliberation, I decided to visit four different locations: Sunol Regional Wilderness (#1 in the map above), Morgan Territory Regional Preserve (#2), Mount Tamalpais (#3), and the Santa Cruz Mountains (#4). Taken together, they represented a mix of areas both familiar and unknown, and they happened to be located at the four literal corners of the Bay Area.
This project was unique for one reason. When I visit somewhere like Yosemite, perhaps one of the most photographed parks in the world, I feel the weight of comparison on my shoulders. I’ve seen countless photographs of Half Dome, El Capitan, and Yosemite Falls, and they inevitably affect my own perceptions and expectations. For all the locations except for Mount Tamalpais, I came across relatively few landscape photographs of those places. This afforded me an unusual privilege—I had almost no expectations of what I “should” photograph, which allowed me to explore based almost solely on my own curiosity.
Corner #1: Sunol Regional Wilderness
I had already visited the park on a recent trip in a failed attempt to find some wildflowers. This time, I wanted to hike a different trail and try my luck again. I pored over a map of the area and found a trail which seemed to offer wide-open views of the park. Then on a weekend afternoon, I drove up a winding, one-lane road until I found the trailhead, then hiked up to the ridgeline.
At the top of the ridge, I found a lovely vista overlooking the Sunol wilderness, with some lupines in full bloom. After a month of trying, I found the wildflowers I wanted. Unfortunately, on this visit, the entire ridgeline was buffeted by high winds, making it nearly impossible to create a sharp photo of the flowers. I packed up my macro lens, snapped a few more record shots, and enjoyed the windswept scenery.
I returned to the area on a stormy afternoon. It had been overcast and rainy for most of the day, but I drove out to the trailhead hoping that the weather might clear just a bit at sunset.
When I reached the top, the sun started peeking through the clouds, illuminating the lupines. However, just like last time the wind still posed a bit of a problem. Fortunately, I noticed occasional breaks in the wind, so I sat on the ground, camera in hand, patiently waiting for the right moment.
Finally, the wind subsided just enough that I decided to try my luck. Nailing the exposure became a balancing act. Though the wind had died down, the flowers continued to sway. I needed a high shutter speed so that they wouldn’t blur. However, I also wanted to use a smaller aperture to maximize depth-of-field. Eventually I settled on sacrificing depth of field in favor of keeping the flowers sharp.
As the wind picked up again, I realized that it would be easier to photograph larger scenes—grand landscapes. I hiked over to another nearby hill, overlooking the Tri-Valley area north of Sunol, and waited for the sun to go down. The clouds began to accumulate, and I started to wonder if sunset would happen at all. As I waited, the high winds pushed layers of clouds on top of each other. The valley remained in shade, but the clouds started to catch some fine light.
I switched between an 18-35mm and 55mm lens to focus on both the breadth of the scene before me and to isolate specific elements that stood out.
The light became better and better as the sun set. Finally, the clouds lit up bright pink and purple before the colors faded along with the last light of the day.
Corner #2: Morgan Territory Regional Preserve
Satisfied by my trips to Sunol, I turned my attention to somewhere I had never visited. I would check out the Morgan Territory Regional Preserve, a 5,000-acre park located in one of the most remote corners of the Bay Area.
I didn’t know what to expect when I drove up the steep one-lane road to the preserve. When I arrived at the main parking lot, I grabbed a trail map from an information box and hiked out in search of…something. I started hiking without a set destination or trail in mind. Eventually I started following a loop trail which took me through a combination of forests, grassy meadows, and thick brush. Though I found a few scenes, including a meadow full of California goldfields, none of them translated into very convincing photographs.
However, the trip did have a photographic silver lining. A few days later, I decided to return to a view I had spotted on the side of the road on my way to the park. For years, I had envisioned creating a photograph of the area’s rolling green hills. It had taken a while to find the right balance of leading lines in a landscape, but I had a good hunch about the scene I had found.
I made the drive back out to that narrow, windy road and parked my car in the narrowest turnout I’d ever seen. Once I set up my tripod and camera, I attached an 80-200mm zoom lens and a warming filter to accentuate the warm afternoon light.
The shot was now lined up, but a herd of cows stood in the picture. Initially I planned to wait until after they had moved away, but I decided to fire off a few safety shots in case the light changed. Once they moved, I fired off a few more photos, thinking they would be the winners. To my surprise, when I reviewed the film I realized I liked the first exposures with the cows.
The cattle lent a sense of scale to the scene that I thought the subsequent photos lacked. They also provided a nice counterbalance to the greens and yellows of the grass.
Corner #3: Mount Tamalpais
Of all the locations I visited for this article, I’m most familiar with Mount Tam. I’ve visited often to photograph above the clouds. Its elevation and location just above the Pacific Ocean make it ideal for sunsets when the rest of the area is covered in fog. However, the weather on the mountain can also be fickle.
On more than one occasion, I have set up for what seemed to be a perfect foggy sunset shot, only for the clouds to suddenly swallow up the sun. In short, Mount Tam can be simultaneously frustrating and rewarding in equal measure, which might help explain why I’ve returned so often.
My first visit of the month showcased the mountain’s extremes. I drove through dense clouds fully expecting to find the top of the peak perfectly clear, only to find more fog when I arrived. With wide-open landscapes out of the question, I descended into a nearby redwood forest and hiked along the trail looking for small scenes.
The misty conditions made the hike feel like a trek through a prehistoric rainforest. Droplets of water dripped down from all the trees above me, making it a race to take photos without getting my camera gear wet.
With both my camera gear and me thoroughly soaked, I returned to higher elevations in search of some clearer weather. The clouds had thinned from a few hours prior, and I stopped for a hike at an area of the mountain where the fog evaporated into clear skies right before my eyes. Clouds swept past me, only to vanish moments later. I started running back and forth along the trail looking for subjects to photograph amidst the foggy chaos.
Once the fog stuck around, I drove further away from the coast in search of a clear view for sunset. I hiked up a trail to a fire lookout tower on Mount Tam’s East Peak, which overlooks the bay. I had made the trek up to the summit multiple times, but always struggled to create a satisfying photograph here. Unless I opted for a telephoto shot, the rocky slopes offer few foreground elements for a well-balanced photo, or so I thought.
Today turned out differently. I spotted a split boulder perched in front of a perfectly set layer of fog and a distant Mount Diablo in the background. I had hiked the trail so many times before, so I had walked past the boulder on numerous occasions. Yet I never noticed it until today. A surprise, to be sure, but a welcome one. I counted my blessings, then climbed up a boulder for a better angle.
I appreciate this photo in large part because it captures the vast size of the Bay Area. Almost forty miles separates the foreground, on Mount Tamalpais, with the background, Mount Diablo.
A week later, I returned with my friend Tiffany to perfect conditions for sunset—clear skies, with a layer of low-hanging fog slowly moving in from the coast. We waited for dusk at the top of a hill with panoramic views of Marin County. The light looked beautiful, but I had a difficult time lining up a shot.
As the sun started to dip below the fog, I saw a perfect juxtaposition of fog and rolling hills. The scene looked wonderful. Unfortunately, it was right underneath the sunset. I say unfortunately because I generally avoid shooting directly into the sun. The strong light often overwhelms the exposure latitude of my film, even with my trusty graduated neutral density filter. To top it all off, I had loaded a roll of Fujifilm Velvia 50, a particularly finicky film for this sort of lighting situation.
However, I was feeling lucky that day, and so I pointed the camera into the sun, slotted in a 3-stop hard-edged graduated neutral density filter in front of my lens, and clicked the shutter. I felt eighty percent certain that the resulting photograph would be too harsh. Well, I thought, at least I tried.
To my surprise, the resulting photograph turned out perfectly. The filter did just enough to hold back the bright highlights in the photo. Meanwhile, the fog dissipated slightly to reveal some of the more distant hillsides.
Corner #4: Santa Cruz Mountains
With three locations checked off my list, I just needed to visit the Santa Cruz Mountains. This area was not initially a part of my plan. I had originally intended to visit the San Mateo Coast, just west of the range, but that area had cloudy skies on practically every day I was free. Finally, after reading yet another disappointing forecast for overcast skies along the coast, I drove up into the mountains instead. I did a quick Google search on the side of the road to find a trail, but other than that, I had no clear expectations or knowledge of what I might find that day.
Once I started hiking, I spotted a clearer view of the coastal fog as it moved inland. The confluence of fog with intersecting ridgelines caught my attention, and I immediately began working the scene, hiking up and down the trail with my camera and tripod looking for the best angle.
As I looked back behind me, I noticed a clear view of the peninsula going all the way up to San Francisco and beyond. I knew that if I could make my way to higher ground, I might be able to find a better view. I strolled along the winding trail until it turned towards the top of a hill. Now, with sunset fast approaching, I ran to the top and breathlessly began setting up my tripod for sunset. Just as I had hoped, I spotted Mount Tamalpais, forty-seven miles north of me on the opposite end of the bay. Although I had brought an 80-200mm zoom lens, it didn’t reach far enough to capture the scene properly.
Thankfully I brought a 2x teleconverter, a nifty attachment which doubled my lens’s focal length, turning it into a 160-400mm zoom. However, the added reach came at the expense of a dimmer image (I now needed to add two extra stops of exposure) and loss of autofocus.
As dusk turned into evening, it became increasingly more challenging to dial in my settings. The dark shadows of early evening threw off my camera’s meter, and I had trouble discerning focus in the dimming viewfinder. I would click the shutter after seemingly nailing the focus, only to realize with another turn of the lens that the image had been blurry. After some trial and error, I decided that I would play it safe by bracketing my exposures and finetuning my focus across half a roll of exposures. In that moment, I tried my best to not think about the exorbitant cost of transparency film.
Of the seventeen exposures, I found one that was both sharp and well-exposed. Like my split boulder photo on Mount Tam, this too captures the sheer scale of the Bay Area. Within the space of less than fifty miles, the view alternates between city lights, fog, mountains, and dense forests, all layered on top of one another.
I had a lot of fun putting this project together. I feel satisfied with the pictures and think that at least one from each location will earn a spot in my portfolio. Unlike my trips to the Sierra, which all require at least a four to six hour drive one-way, all these locations were within an hour and a half’s drive from home. The shorter distances allowed me to make repeated visits in a way that would be practically impossible anywhere else. I could set out on spur of the moment trips based on weather conditions that same day. That luxury allowed me to approach my photography differently. The stakes felt lower, so I felt free to explore and experiment. Of course, I still love visiting more distant locations. But I have come to appreciate that I don’t necessarily have to travel very far for great scenery.
