David & Sherry Photography

#40

After All That Effort, Sometimes You Just Get Lucky

Many years ago there was a photographer who was doing work in Photoshop that we didn't understand. We couldn't replicate the incredible beauty he was able to pull out of each photo and I wanted to know how he did it... well it turned out he was holding a 3-hour local photoshop class... in San Francisco... in 2 weeks...

So I jumped on a plane to San Francisco where I stayed for a grand total of 30 hours to learn some of the most profound, career-changing photoshop techniques I have learned. After arriving into SFO at 11:00 pm I found my hotel and went to sleep. When you wake up in San Fran with morning and an early afternoon available to do whatever you want but without a car what do you do??? Well, I rent a bike and ride over 30 miles around SF to see the highlights I hadn't seen before. Travel over the Golden Gate Bridge, go see the interesting things... and I really wanted to take my own iconic picture of the Golden Gate Bridge which is an engineering marvel and after having a whole day of crystal blue skies, as I rode up to the lookout point to the bridge the clouds rolled in... really heavily! So heavily I couldn't see 20 feet in front of me.

The upside is all the tourists go away at a time like this so I have the lookout all to myself and seeing as how I had nothing better to do I just waited... and waited... and waited but the clouds rolled on so that I couldn't even see the iconic red/orange paint of the bridge that was right in front of my face. That is until just for an incredibly brief moment a portion of the clouds broke and I had the chance to capture this photo.

1/250; f/9.0; ISO 200; 34.0 mm.