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Friday Slide Show: Tiburon
9 January 2015
Just across the Golden Gate Bridge, a bit beyond Sausalito and to the east, you'll find Tiburon and neighboring Belvedere Island. Three years ago with relatives in town we escaped to Tiburon for lunch on the water.
We still remember the day fondly. It may have been January but it was warm, so we sat outside at Servino. We ordered the linguine and clams, our brother-in-law had a cozy salmon sandwich and sister-in-law a shrimp salad. All very nice.
We hated to leave but as we were walking through the long restaurant to return to the street, we heard Moon River on the sound system. We all laughed because, well, that's their song.
You can't buy an experience like that. It's just magic. Local magic.
Once in a while you feel like you do have all the time in the world, you know.
We had brought along a Nikon AW100 digicam which had a GPS radio in it. Every now and then, we'd take a photo and look up our location on the map the digicam displayed in Playback mode. That's how we made it around Belvedere Island and back -- as if we had all the time in the world.
Once in a while you feel like you do have all the time in the world, you know.
Some of our AW100 shots were tourist postcards, of course. Tiburon's main drag is quaint but not fake. Old buildings well maintained. They beg you to take their picture.
The little town is walkable. And charming. You can take the ferry there from San Francisco or you can drive over the bridge (but not this weekend when a new collision barrier is being installed, the first weekend closure ever for the historic span).
One quirk of the AW100 was its unreliable auto white balance. The second shot in the slide show into the sun is a good example, blushing a blue that just wasn't there. We've reeled it in a bit (the original looked like a cyanotype) but it still is more monochrome than color.
But pointed north, the AW100 managed to do better and our shots of some of the old buildings downtown came out well. We did straighten them in Lightroom using the Upright tool and then cropped them a bit tighter to avoid distractions along the edges of the frame. Routine cosmetics.
As JPEGs they didn't give us the latitude of the DNGs we usually present on our Friday slide shows. Clarity improved the sharpness and Shadow and Highlight sliders recovered detail at both ends of the histogram (but it was a fight). We didn't have to fiddle with Exposure at all. The AW100 got that right.
It's January again and Servino's beckons. All we need is a visiting relative with a rental car "out to see the world." There's such a lot of world to see.
