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Scenic Spot
27 November 2018
There is a little balcony on Mount Davidson just a stumble below the summit that affords a view of the city's eastern flank from downtown south.
Scenic Spot. Nikon D200 with 50mm f1.4 Nikkor at f13, 1/160 second and ISO 400. Processed in Adobe Camera Raw.
We were looking down from the summit one foggy day 10 years ago and saw a couple making the most of the view. The dead tree behind them seemed to point the way.
That tree no longer survives, a victim of one storm or another.
So when we ran across this image while searching for another one, we paused a moment to pay our respects. Then we thought it might not make a bad black-and-white image.
So we pulled it up in Adobe Camera Raw, converted it to monochrome and adjusted the red, orange and yellow hues to help the hill stand out and the green of the evergreens in the fog recede.
We also went the other way for once with Dehaze, softening the image a bit.
Detail. In the full-size image, the couple is distinct if not recognizable.
We used the street lighting as a guide to very slightly straighten the image because if we know one thing about our composition tendencies it's to skew the horizon.
And then we resized the full image for publication here.
That obscures the couple in the frame, so we've presented a detail of them above. If you had a 13x19 print of this image, you'd notice them but they wouldn't be more prominent than the tree standing out against the fog.
We did manage to keep the tree in the carousel thumbnail for this story. And the fog and the couple, all three elements that set the scene.
It's misty today, a mix of fog and some light rain. We think we'll wrap this up and go for a walk. See what we can see.