Embarcadero Fog

I wish I didn't have to open the week with this article. I started last week with my dad's old Mamiya/Sekor 1000DTL and a Kino-made Vivitar 28mm lens. The lens is great, though it shift all colors slightly to the blue. The negatives all came out very thick, indicating overexposure. This resulted from me forgetting to put a battery in the camera and having to estimate the exposure. Typically, I can do this well and get within 1/3 or 1/2 of a stop with 400 ISO film. However, the fog threw off my estimations and most of the images weren't salvageable. So some of these images will have excessive scanner noise (horizontal lines on the shots.) This noise indicates improper exposure and, without excuse, I messed up this roll for a silly, avoidable reason -- I forgot to check my battery. That said, a few shots returned acceptable results.


Had this been properly exposed, it would be an early front runner for one of my top-20 photos this year, I think. A moored tugboat, the Bay Bridge disappearing into a fog, and a boat, almost imperceptible, distant in the fog as though a ghost ship.


A lonely, brown seagull. What is he pondering? The risks of fog-flying versus his need for breakfast? Does he see the fog-bound ships and wonder at their forms, their purpose, and their destination? Maybe he just wants an anchovie, or some discarded french fries.


Fog and light interact in manners which border on ephemerally profound. The fog, low, cityscape-bound, moved and among skyscrapers and was eviscerated. Equally insidious, the sun burned away at it, dissipated it, returned it to vapor from mist. As the sun reached lower into the city, reaching for the people to warm the ground and streets, and sidewalks, it first touched the skyscrapers. Light, like long, pianists fingers reflected off the buildings, reached to the surrounding buildings and city as though to play a fog-dissipating concerto. Here those fingers begin to form, to fan, stretch, and reach into the fog below.


Ignoring the scanner noise, a reasonably well framed Bay Bridge in fog. That said, it was not reasonably well exposed.


I don't understand this sculpture, but whatever. My goal was to capture the buildings behind it disappearing into fog.


In a roll rife with errors, this presents the most tangible. During development, this negative's emulsion was not properly aligned in the reel and so touched the film in the next spiral pass. That prevented the negative from properly developing, leading to the flame-like whisps along the top and right side. This is why proper film loading during developing is of paramount importance. On my Friday roll, I lost five shots due to improper loading.

So, lessons learned on this trip:

1- Remember to put a battery in the camera.
2- Film sees more light in fog that the human eye and exposure formulas need to adjust accordingly
3- The Bay Bridge is not an interesting subject when shot from below.