I took several photos during our short stay but ended up only really liking the four included in this post. I chose this image for the top of the post just because it represents one of San Francisco’s most famous icons (90mm, 1/125 sec, f/11, ISO 400).
Sometime during the 2023 year, I realized that Billie and I were just months away from celebrating a milestone anniversary – our 40th. I figured that it was certainly worth a splurge and suggested that we spend a few nights in a ritzy hotel in San Francisco and have some nice dinners in places we’d not tried before (or had not been to in a long, long time). And, that’s what we did in early December.
We also used some of the dinners to meet up with friends we don’t see often enough who live in the City or north of it. But we did keep one night just for the two of us and were directed (by our hotel’s concierge) to a small, Russian Hill neighborhood Italian restaurant, called — Seven Hills. It was definitely a winner and one we will return to the next time we’re in San Francisco.
The first evening we were in town, after dining with friends and just before we decided to call it a day, I headed out briefly to see if I could get anything interesting (like a cable car climbing the hill). Unfortunately, I did not see any cable cars (maybe too late for them to be running) and traffic was fairly light (it was a Sunday night). But I did take a few photos just to get something that would kind of establish the area we were in. Here’s what I finally got.
For you photographer’s wondering about the unusual camera settings, I knew I’d be taking photos of moving objects so a long exposure would not work for the shot I wanted. I set the aperture to 4.0 (the largest opening on this lens) in order to admit the most light, and focused long to keep everything sharp. Finally, I set the ISO very high in order to assure a fairly fast shutter speed (knowing I would also be greatly increasing the amount of electronic noise in the image). Then in post-processing I used the fairly new Denoise feature recently added to Adobe’s Lightroom programs which did a wonderful job of cleaning up the image.
I went out the next day in the afternoon. still staying within a small number of blocks. As I wandered around I was struck by how all the different styles and ages of buildings in this area seem to exist so comfortably next to each other. In this photo, there’s a building that appears to reflect a Chinese influence (which seems appropriate since it is on Grant Avenue — the heart of San Francisco’s Chinatown). Right across Grant Avenue from that building is Old Saint Mary’s Cathedral (a Gothic Revival style Catholic church which has been there since 1854), which, in turn, is very close to a very modern office building. In the upper left corner of the image you can see a small segment of the famous Transamerica Pyramid just a few blocks away.
In a tiny alley (Pratt Place) off California Street, I came across this interesting, somewhat whimsical mural that fairly accurately portrays the California Street cable car in this neighborhood. Sadly, someone had felt the need to tag this art with a large, black, squiggle (signature?) on the buildings to the right of the cable car. I used some Adobe Photoshop tools to remove the tag from the mural (I tried the new Remove tool first, but it didn’t work well enough in this case, so I switched to the even newer Generative Fill tool and it worked like a charm). In addition, there was a large, steel post in the sidewalk (protecting the side of the actual building from cars and trucks?) which I removed from the photo, as well (again, using Generative Fill).
I also took the photo featured at the top of this post while on the same little walk-about. I wanted a cable car image and saw one coming up California Street. I simply waited for it to get closer. Happily, as it crested the steep stretch from Grant Avenue to Stockton Street, it took a pause giving me the perfect opportunity to setup that composition.
We stayed in town for another night and enjoyed dinner with a friend who lives mostly in the Napa Valley and also has a place in San Francisco. All in all, it was a wonderful anniversary visit in the City I was born and raised in.
And that’s the end of this very short post. I hope you enjoyed it. Remember you can always see the images included in this post in a larger, more detailed form, by jumping over to my Flickr site (in the 2023 Album) or (in this case) by visiting the San Francisco Bay Area in my photography website. We hope you have a wonderful holiday season and the best year yet, in 2024.
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