Misty Gate

San Francisco, California, USA.

Historically I take the best images when I'm happy: I spent a lovely afternoon in the Golden Gate park, killing time wandering with my camera rather aimlessly around lakes, waterfalls and chinese pavilions, sometimes lost, still accompanied by beauty and grace in a cloudy cold day of June in San Francisco.

It made me happy.

I then moved to the Golden Gate bridge an hour before sunset, met by the fog on the Bay that I was hoping for. No golden light from the sun was cutting through the thick fog, only a small portion of the bridge was visible, while the rest was lost in the dark blue mist. There still were so many people leaving a warm and bright place, heading towards what they could not see at the end of the bridge, if there was an end, looking for something either better or entirely different, or simply crossing without knowing why. Shall we cross the bridge?

Very strong winds made a long exposure practically impossible: I planted the tripod as firmly as possible against a wooden pole to add stability. I manually focused on the closest portion of the bridge, set the aperture to f/5, in order to get the exposure time to a more manageable 1.0s to reduce the chances of camera shaking induced by the strong wind. I chose to shoot at 30mm to include the emptiness on the right in the frame.
This is an image of contrasts to reflect my contrasting feelings when I created it: the busy warm area on the bottom left of the frame, against the empty cold mist on the top right of the frame where the bridge is pointing to.

This image is a metaphor: the composition reinforces the metaphor.