Capturing the light.

Pursuit of SF Fog from Mt Tam (1)

What is your top dream photography of San Francisco?  If you ask me, it would be the foggy SF captured from far away.  Take a look at Instagram and you will see what I meant.

Friday evening, I sent a message to my Dance with Light photography group, and happily got 5 confirmed for a “short” trip for Mt Tam Saturday evening.  Yay!

This is the link that Jolin Tsai, my good friend, sent me:

Hike to the Summit of Mt. Tamalpais

Mt. Tam is a large park with plenty of amazing viewpoints, but the East routes and the East Peak are best for sunsets.

Our plan was to arrive there at 7:30pm, one hour before the sunset.  But two groups of us did not arrive until 8:10pm, we almost missed it!  Well, the optimistic way to look at it is: Yes, we made it!  🙂

The reason we were so late was one, the traffic was getting worse and worse one hour before sunset, and two, our car got locked in a fire road as we went to a Fern Creek Trail parking lot, and we had to call the park information line to get a ranger to give us the unlock code for the gate lock.  The ranger locked the gate way too early!  It was quite an adventure!

By the time we got to Mt Tam, we did not have the time to drive all 8 miles to the end to see which spot is the best, so we stopped roughly 4 miles out from the cross of Alice Eastwood and Panoramic Road.  We were told that we need to drive 8 miles to the end, we didn’t.  But these are what we got, we are happy!

We did not get the fog this time, just perfect lighting and a great time… …  We will pursue the fog again soon!  I think the correct way to get there is as following image shows: take E Ridgecrest Blvd to the end to park, then hike along Fern Creek Trail to “Mt Tamalpais East Peak”.