Alamo Square, San Francisco
Old Houses, New Skyline
From the grass at Alamo Square, a row of Victorians with the downtown towers rising behind them.
The view from Alamo Square is one of the best-known in San Francisco, and for good reason. It puts two versions of the city in the same frame: a row of ornate wooden houses in front, and the glass towers of downtown behind.
The houses run across the middle of the picture, each one painted differently: a dark blue-grey house at the left with a round turret, then a run of gabled facades in green, cream, mustard, sage and pale blue, their trim picked out in contrasting colours. Every house has its own steep gable, its own bay windows and decorative details. A trimmed, rounded tree stands in front of almost every one, like a row of green umbrellas along the sidewalk. Cars are parked along the curb below.
Behind the rooftops, the skyline. On the left, the pointed spire of a pyramid-shaped tower, and near the centre, a tall rounded tower rising above the rest, with a cluster of downtown buildings spread across the horizon in grey and white. On the right edge, a tall modern apartment block cuts into the frame, a reminder that the city around the square isn't frozen in time either.
The sky made this frame. It was a clean, deep blue, darkening toward the top, with no clouds at all. That gave the colours of the houses room to breathe and set the skyline crisply against it.
I made the photograph from the park, with the lawn running across the bottom of the frame. The grass is a strip of bright green that grounds everything and adds distance between you and the houses. A park bench or two sits along the path, which I left in because the park is where people actually stand to see this view.
The challenge with a scene this famous is the same as with the Golden Gate: it has been photographed countless times. I didn't try to reinvent it. I tried to make it clean. Level horizon, all the houses fully in the frame, the skyline sitting neatly between the gables, nothing cut off awkwardly at the edges.
From the bag
Sony A7R III · Sony FE 16-35mm F2.8 GM II · 35mm · 1/5000s · f/2.8 · ISO 100
At 35mm, the long end of the 16-35mm, I could fit the full row of houses and the skyline without the distortion of a wider setting. Shooting at f/2.8 might seem odd for a landscape, but at this distance depth of field is still deep enough to keep the houses and the skyline acceptably sharp. In full sun at ISO 100 that gave me 1/5000s. If I were doing it again I'd stop down to f/8 for a touch more edge sharpness; there was more than enough light to do so.