There are more images in the 123 series, but this is the last one I am going to talk about here.
San Pablo Avenue pretty much ends where the Freeway entrance to the Carquinez Bridge crosses the Sacramento River. The road itself continues past the Freeway, but the street name is changed as it becomes part of the City of Crockett.
I couldn’t figure out how to take an interesting picture of this bridge. When crossing it, there is something I have always liked the C&H Sugar building, and this caused me to want to include that building in my photo, so I started looking for a vantage point. Just before this bridge/Freeway junction, there is a “scenic view” turnout overlooking the river for at least 180° East and West. This offered possibilities, but in order to get my desired point of view, I had to climb over the parking lot guardrail and then the heavy brush obscured a clear view.
Shortly after, I was reading the user manual for my camera, and the page on shooting panoramic images used a bridge as an example.
I like panoramic images. Because there is so much accumulated information, a lot of detail is brought out, and because the lens position changes during the exposures, there is a perspective shift that can visual interest to even a mundane picture of a bridge. I have attempted a numberof panoramics, with various successes stitching them together.
I drove back out there, and just to the East of that Vista Point is the Dead Fish Seafood Restaurant. As I pulled into their parking lot, I found a small private road that dipped down practically to the riverbank.
I grabbed my tripod, walked down, and started scouting for a good vantage point. I came to a flat spot that presented me with the viewpoint I wanted, and the setting Sun was low enough to light up the C&H building, but rapidly heading towards the horizon. I didn’t have time to think about setting up a tripod or all of the “best practices” for shooting panoramic images. I just started shooting.
I took about 50 images, thinned them down to 35, and loaded them into the stitching software.
Frankly, I didn’t expect much, there was just so many lines and angles to fit together.
Stitching images together accumulates a lot of information (the finished file is 131MB and the final image is 4½ feet long)
so it took a long time for the software to do its thing, but it did it well-surprisingly well. Because the Sun was setting so rapidly, the individual photos got progressively darker by the time I got to the far side of the river, so we had to use some gradient lightening in order to even up the final image from left to right. This too, worked very well. Except for a bit of cropping, there was no other editing done to this image.
I was so pleased with the results, that I kept the jagged image edges created by the stitching software.
Copyright 2016 Jimmy Reina
My position that this image is a partnership between the software and me, and the hand of the software needs to be recognized as much as my own.
http://www.jimmyreinaphoto.com
UPDATE: This photo was well received at the time, but panoramic software later became so common, and so easy to use, that teenagers are making panoramics of their bedrooms. It no longer has the same impact, especially online.
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