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Curfew
2 June 2020
Last night was the second night of a city-wide curfew in San Francisco that began at 8 p.m. and ended at 5 a.m. this morning. And we thought the coronavirus had shut the city down.
Curfew. Nikon D300 with 18-200mm Nikkor at 27mm (40.5mm equivalent) and f5.6, 1/8 second and ISO 6400.
No, this is a real shutdown. Everyone has been ordered to stay in their homes except first responders, essential workers and, well, the homeless.
Sunday night was ominously quiet. Not an Uber to be seen flying through the Stop sign at the corner or coming down our one-way street the wrong way. Not even someone walking a dog.
Everyone has been ordered to stay in their homes except first responders, essential workers and, well, the homeless.
And the busy thoroughfare just a block over, whose interminable traffic we pretend is the rush of soothing white noise, was dead silent. Our ears hurt.
Last night we thought we'd try to capture a portrait of the city under curfew (without leaving our house). We tried three views. This was the last one.
We liked it best because it showed the hillside on the other side of the thoroughfare with light on at every house. Just like the block leading down the hill in front of us. And the ocean is even bright enough to detect with all that light pollution (and moonlight, of course).
We don't have a camera with very high ISO sensitivity and certainly not very good dynamic range at high ISO. But we gave it the old college try and screened a duplicate layer of the image to bring out more detail. That multiples the value of each pixel, effectively increasing the ISO.
We dealt with the increased noise like a professional but we knew our resampled image here would bin the pixels and take care of a lot of it automatically.
The curfew is designed to prevent vandalism and looting (which has even reached the pharmacy in our neighborhood, but only the pharmacy, and for the obvious reasons).
But it has given us another experience of the city. One we couldn't have bought. Utterly silent streets through the night as if there really were peace on earth and not just to men of good will.