One last post from my trip out to San Francisco earlier this month. A collection of shots of the Golden Gate Bridge.

A dense fog rolled in suddenly on the afternoon of the 9th.

I got these shots with the rented 400mm telephoto lens, while out in San Francisco. He was perched on a telephone pole about 100 feet away. In the image below, the background you see is a portion of the Golden Gate bridge.

I had to ask Roger for help identifying him but even he had a hard time of it.

It’s a tough call. I’m guessing you saw this in California … Most places in the country, the most common hawk is the Red-tailed, and that’s probably what this is, but I can’t say for sure. It looks like the beak is deformed, which means it might have trouble finding food and perhaps has resorted to eating garbage, which could discolor it’s bill and feathers. I think it’s an immature, which makes the plumage more confusing. And there are various degrees of melanism (the opposite of albinism) which are fairly common in the West. So, if you have a melanistic immature that’s been digging in garbage, it won’t look typical at all. Other possibilities are Rough-legged or Red-shouldered.

I’m going with Red-tailed.

The background in this one is Angel Island.

For my birthday this year, Karen purchased $150.00 worth of lens rentals from lensrentals.com. I rented two lenses in anticipation of my trip to San Francisco: a Carl Zeiss ZE 50mm f/2 Makro Planar and a Canon 100-400mm f/4.5-5.6L IS telephoto. I ended up not getting too many shots with the telephoto, since it rained pretty much the whole weekend and I didn’t come across a whole lot that needed to be telephoto-ed. But I fell in love with that macro lens. The pictures I posted of that tartlette, from Miette Patisserie, were shot with the macro lens.

And then there was this.

We saw a lot of these guys while walking around the forested areas south of the Golden Gate bridge. They seem to really enjoy when it rains. Understandable since they’re covered in mucus all the time. I imagine they get dehydrated pretty easily. The rain broke just long enough for me to attach the macro lens and crawl around in the mud so I could get up close and personal with this fella.

I’ve recently taken a fancy to street photography. I like observing people and imagining what they’re thinking about. Street photography seems to be a logical extension of that. Ideally, the photographer should be discreet. Keep the camera away from your face. Don’t use flash. Learn to see with your hands, so to speak. Unless you’re Bruce Gilden, who breaks all those “rules”.

I shot these with the camera hanging from a strap on my shoulder and I used a remote wireless trigger to trip the shutter.

Miette Patisserie is a San Francisco area pastry shop. I picked this up at their Ferry Building location, on the Embarcadero. It tasted as good as it looked. Creamy and tart lime filling housed in a buttery, crunchy graham cracker crust, topped with smooth, lightly toasted meringue. Not as good as what Karen would’ve made, but pretty good nonetheless.