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The Rain-Washed City
16 November 2015
Looking North. Crystal clear.
Sometimes you have to let the office chair swivel all by itself. Today was one of those times. We laced up our boots and hiked around Twin Peaks to the northern side to see what was cooking.
Turns out, it was the best time to do that. It was just after it had rained. Well, a couple of days after anyway.
We shot this in Aperture Priority mode so we could sharpen the scene with an f8 aperture at 1/250 second and ISO 200. We used a circular polarizer on our zoom, which was racked out to 48mm, a slight telephoto on the Nikon D300.
But that was wide enough to see both sides of the two buildings we were shooting through. We knew, as we composed the image, that we were going to do some iron chef-like cropping to make this a very narrow image.
We liked that idea, though.
The narrow image is sort of like looking through layers of civilization, except in this case we're looking from an inviting window in the foreground across the city grid to the monumental buildings on the hill and on to the bay itself and the coastal range beyond the bay.
Looking north, you can see St. Ignatius Church on the campus of the University of San Francisco. The tiled tower to the right is the Lone Mountain campus, formerly a women's college and now part of the University of San Francisco.
We processed the full resolution DNG image in Lightroom with Camera Raw 9.1.1 and then ran it through Piccure+ as a TIFF with the Lightroom adjustments. On export, we resized and sharpened the image you see here.
It just fits on our 17-inch laptop's monitor but this is the sort of image that really needs to be printed to be appreciated. In a 13x19-inch print you can appreciate the detail we've had to resize away.
Which reminds us to tell you we updated our list of Best Products earlier today. The latest and greatest products in each category (some not quite shipping yet) didn't quite replace our old favorites, though.
We couldn't bear to dump our previous favorites (particularly since we still use them), so we marked them as "Best Used" products just under the currently available models.