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Friday Slide Show: North Lake Merced
15 January 2016
Lake Merced is a large dual lake system in the southwest corner of San Francisco near the zoo. Despite being adjacent to the ocean, it's a natural spring-fed freshwater system in which local ground water also plays a part in replenishing the North and South lakes.
We spent much of our youth at the lake, living just across the road from it. There were the early morning jaunts to fish for trout after the lake had been stocked. Then summer golf at the public courses between the two lakes. And finally the runs around the 4.4 mile perimeter to get in shape.
Despite that connection, we're not terribly fond of old Lake Merced. It's better appreciated from afar.
But the other day we wandered out on the bluff to the north of the North Lake and liked what we saw. The gleaming fairways of Harding Park ran like a ribbon behind the cypress trees on the edge of the bluff, their shadows floating on the opaque green water of the lake.
The gleaming fairways of Harding Park ran like a ribbon behind the cypress trees on the edge of the bluff, their shadows floating on the opaque green water of the lake.
We had a Nikon D200 with us. A 43-86mm Nikkor with a circular polarizer was mounted on it. We pointed it into the sun and shot away as we walked along the bluff.
They aren't the sharpest shots. But sharpness isn't everything.
It's really the color that attracted us and we managed to capture that. The changing color of the lake water, the unreal fairways, the dark trees, the blue sky fading to white in the sunlight.
At the end of the path we followed there is a statue by Julian Martinez of Juan Bautista De Anza, the founder of San Francisco. It was a gift in 1967 from Luis Encina, the governor of the state of Sonora, Mexico where De Anza was born. It stood originally at the Ferry Building and later stood quite majestically where Dolores St. meets Market St. Then it was moved to the lake where it cuts not as monumental a figure in the parking lot.
We processed these images two ways.
The first was quick and easy, just importing them into the current Lightroom CC and editing the DNGs in the Develop module.
That approach left us a little unsatisfied, though.
The shots were into the sun for the most part and even though we shaded the lens with our hand, it hadn't been able to manage the glare very well. When we used Lightroom's tools to bring back some contrast and color, the effect was a bit garrish.
So we went back to the DNGs and processed them in Piccure, famous for it lens corrections. It created some very dark, flat TIFFs we imported into Lightroom. But when we made our corrections in the Develop module, we seemed to have a good deal more latitude. The results had smoother gradations of tone and modulated color with a bit more sharpness.
We did add some Dehazing to the distance shots. And we made a color correction to the bench (which was a bit too warm in the low afternoon sun).
