On Thursday I headed over to the Exploratorium’s new Pier 15 home to take a round of photographs. Pier 15 is a great location for the museum with its dramatic waterfront siting sandwiched between the city’s center and San Francisco Bay itself. On Thursday it was more dramatic yet for the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) research vessel the Bell M. Shimada. What fun to see this large white ship parked just outside the windows of the museum’s new Observatory.

The ship as seen from inside the Exploratorium’s second floor Observatory.

The Exploratorium’s interest in documented their first ship visit led to a quick invitation to KAP from the deck of the ship. My first act was to check the weather forecast where I was relieved to find a prediction of 10 kt. winds from the north into the early afternoon. When winds are from the more typical WNW this site is in the lee of Telegraph Hill and the kite flying becomes very difficult for KAP – large scale cells of turbulence and quick changes in wind velocity from >15 mph to practically zero. I have flown in these conditions on a few occasions (once with Simon Harbord years ago) and wished never to again – dreadful kite flying. So, happy with the prediction of northerly winds I quickly packed up my gear and headed over to the waterfront. I wanted to get over earlier in the day to avoid shooting into the later afternoon sun.

Many if my shots looked like this as I was wary to send the KAP rig further.

The promised 10 knots out of the north never appeared and instead I found near calm conditions between 11 am and 3 pm. If you have to kill time somewhere the Exploratorium is a great place to do it! I happily watched the dissection of a cow’s eye and played a bit in the Tinkering Studio. Around 3 pm a slight sea breeze showed up, unfortunately from the dreaded NW. Yet again Telegraph Hill seemed to embed leeward eddy demons that were particularly diabolical – winds with “holes” that eliminate lift for a couple of minutes at a time, just long enough to kerplunk my gear in the bay if it is out too far.

A composite image stitched from two landscape-format shots. When the wind filled in for a moment I was able to get the camera out far enough to capture the whole ship. This workable wind only lasted for a few minutes and the camera was then hauled back to a “feet dry” safe conditions.

I boarded the ship just after three and set up shop on a small foredeck about 30 feet above the waterline. I flew three different kites (6, 7.5 and 8.5 Rokkakus) over a two-hour period trying to outwit the winds. This was over two hours of kite flying with multiple cycles of deploying line followed by a quick panic retrieval to keep my gear out of the bay. In the end the quirky winds won and I did not get the sweeping panorama or variety of shots I wanted. But, I am happy to say I wasn’t completely skunked. I did get the camera out toward the end during one five-minute period of sufficient breeze. I was able to go far enough from the pier to get a handful of similarly framed shots.

A composite image stitched from two portrait-format shots.

On a pleasant Sunday morning I headed down to the Visitor Center for the Don Edwards San Francisco Bay National Wildlife Refuge to join a field workshop led by microbiologist Wayne Lanier, my colleague in the Hidden Ecologies Project. Wayne led a group into the restored La Riviere Marsh, once the site of a large salt plant, to examine “life at the bottom of the food chain.” We were accompanied by Felicia, Rachel, and Molly, three young students that have been helping Wayne monitor a series of small pools aligned with an old saltworks levee running through the marsh. The students are keeping weekly records of the pools’ salinity and have been great assistants for Wayne.

Workshop on the levee.

I was there to work on a request for aerial photographs of the subject pools. My nesting season blackout eliminated kite aerial photography so I used my pole aerial photograph rig instead. The challenge was taking a series of 40 or so photographs while walking down the levee and then stitching the results together in a long strip panorama. This set includes a few incidental pole aerial photography images of the site, two normal “around the horizon” aerial panoramas, and the long plan view strip panorama (which turned out rather well).

A normal pole aerial photography panorama.

Here is the strip panorama of the subject pools made by stitching 41 portrait format pole aerial photographs together. I ended up getting the best stitch using Photoshop CS6′s composite image feature. The source file is 3,870 x 39,000 pixels (74 Mb). At 300 dpi this would print at 13″ x 11 feet!

The image is best viewed large.

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After a four-month hiatus I have resumed my kite aerial photography in the South Bay. The short days of winter were devoted to work on my book about the South Bay and a variety of little, barking tasks. So it was great to be out in the open again in the late afternoons of spring.

Salt Pond A17 at high tide with a view of the facility controlling flow to Salt Pond A16.

My return was occasioned by a desire to photograph the recently breached Salt Pond A17 before nesting season put it off limits until September. I had not previously paid much attention to A17, which lies just south of Coyote Creek across from the abandoned hamlet of Drawbridge. The pond was returned to tidal flow last October and it is through A17 that water is provided to (former) Salt Pond A16. This latter pond has recently had a rather extensive makeover with a substantial inlet control station with fish screen, new islands and shallows created for avian habitat, and a new siphon to provide water for the New Chicago Marsh. Given that A17 was now filled by the tides twice a day folks were interested in how natural sediment, a precious commodity in the South Bay, was accumulating.

Dredge marks along the ponds borrow ditch, with some showing the color of halophiles.

My first trip to A17 was ill timed regarding the tides so I captured a few shots of the filled pond, which looked very much like any other pond filled with bay water, and then took some shots of the new flow control facility. I returned a week later to catch A17 at low tide. Here I expected, and found, a pond bottom acquiring the natural colors and textures of natural bay flows – the patina of a thin biofilm here and there and the muted green grays of sediment. What I did not anticipate was a lively and fairly widespread scattering of small, bright pools of red, orange, and pink water. These must be stable pockets of highly saline water supporting populations of halophiles. It is a real surprise (if I am reading it correctly) to find that these little communities are remaining coherent through cycles of tidal inundation, testimony to the density of the concentrated brine and/or the gentleness of the tides. In any event it made for much more lively photographs than I imagined.

Pond bottom with mudflat biofilm patina colors accented by small pockets of (presumed) halophiles.

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I have a photo exhibit of my salt pond photographs up in the Exploratorium’s new Pier 15 home.

The exhibit cascades across three walls flanking a stair that leads from the biology exhibit area to a mezzanine-level area addressing landscapes.

For the last forty years or so the Exploratorium, San Francisco’s venerable science museum, occupied the Palace of Fine Arts, a cavernous Beaux Arts building that served as the centerpiece of the 1915 Panama Pacific International Exposition. A few years ago the museum decided to relocate and selected Pier 15 on the city’s Embarcadero as a new site. Thus began a massive project with architects Esherick, Homesy, Dodge, and Davis to transform the pier into a home worthy of the Exploratorium’s heritage of hands-on science education. The results will soon be public with a grand opening on 17 April 2013. Having seen the project develop I can report that it is a grand success. The original pier building retains its wonderful utilitarian nature and offers visitors the fine experience of occupying a threshold between bay and city. A new glass structure at the end of the pier – the Observatory – provides the perfect foil to the darker volumes of the pier proper and an ambitious program to “uncover the stories embedded in a place by directly observing the geography, history, and ecology of the San Francisco Bay region.”

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Goodness, it has been a while since I posted. My excuse is that I have been quite busy working on a book with a tight deadline. I’ve recently finished the manuscript and image selection so it is in the hands of others now and I can get back to photography.

This is the cover design (by Lorraine Rath) for a book I have underway with Heyday Press covering my photographs of the South San Francisco Bay landscape. The project has been both fun and arduous. The publication date is December 2013.

Heyday Press has now posted an upcoming book announcement.

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I have been fortunate to receive permits from U. S. Fish & Wildlife and California Fish & Wildlife granting permission to take aerial photographs over the South Bay landscape. Each year, as part of the annual cycle of permitting, I  submit progress reports on the Hidden Ecologies Project and a summary of photographs taken. This was a period of moderate activity – 24 trips to the South Bay Salt Pond Restoration sites and adjacent areas. Nineteen of these trips involved KAP sessions with the total for the year of ~9,400 aerial images. These are summarized in the progress report and in my KAP Supplemental CV. You can also view my artist’s statement on the South Bay work, a document that dates back to an exhibit this year at the Hayward Shoreline Interpretive Center.

Click on this map of 2011-2012 aerial photo sessions for a page that provides links to a sample gallery from each session.

I have also posted a 2011-2012 KAP Sampler gallery page with 100 images from the year. You can click through this gallery to larger 1800 x 1200 pixels versions of each image.

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Last Friday I got a chance to reshoot the Pier 94 site I had visited week or so ago (see previous post). In that original session I had struggled a bit with cloudy skies, inconsistent and turbulent winds, and a couple of suboptimal camera settings (e.g., lens wide open and thus soft in the corners).

A stitched panorama of the project site.

This session found sunny skies, a lower tide, and a breeze that was still problematically variable but not to the extent of the 4 August session. The photo yield was much improved.

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Up until the late 19th Century the Islais Creek basin on San Francisco’s southern coast was an impressive tidal marsh. Then the exuberant application of explosives, steam, and later diesel power filled the marsh to create district of industrial works.

A panorama of the Pier 94 site (stitched from 7 portrait format images).

In the current day there is little to recognize of the former wetlands. The Islais Creek channel is still there in a formal, channelized way. Here and there you can find small patches of long neglected shoreline where nature has managed to soften the industrial vocabulary of the landscape. One example is Heron’s Head Park, which we documented earlier in the Hidden Ecologies project. On Saturday I visited another bit of the shore right at the outlet of Islais Creek. This is a site called Pier 94 where the Golden Gate Audubon Society is managing a small plot of land to provide habitat for wildlife and waterfront access for humans.

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Earlier this week I had the pleasure of meeting Scott White, a Professor of Geological Sciences at the University of South Carolina. Scott was interested in trying kite or balloon photography to do some ecological and geomorphic research on the east coast and I agreed to provide an introduction to KAP technique while he was visiting Stanford.

Comparison images of a hummock photographed in 2003 (35-mm slide) and again this week.

We met down at the Don Edwards San Francisco Bay Wildlife Refuge. My permits for photography in the South Bay place most of the area off-limits during the February to August nesting season. Happily, the N Ponds between the Don Edwards Headquarters complex and Dumbarton Point are allowed by my permit during the summer so we discussed holding the demonstration at Salt Pond N1. A quick call to my Don Edwards contact and we had a green light. The pond was the first one I photographed back in 2003 and I was well overdue to shoot there again.

A vertical panorama of the Don Edwards San Francisco Bay National Wildlife Refuge Headquarters Complex.

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A few weeks ago I took my Documentary Photography class down to the salt ponds for a field trip. After poking around La Riviere Marsh, the Red Hill Gravel Quarry and the Coyote Hills we headed out to Dumbarton Point to see the old landing. There, to my delight, was the Mallard II clamshell dredge, which was working on rebuilding the levees along the former course of Beard’s Creek.

Images from the Documentary Photography class field trip.

Having planned a quick demonstration of kite aerial photography for the end of the field trip, I set up a quick session with the dredge as a subject. Unfortunately, the time was late and the winds were fading so aside from a few low and distant shots I had little to show from that demonstration session. I made a note to return and last Sunday had a chance to do so.

Making new levee

When I returned the Mallard II was still parked along the Beard’s Creek levees but was not actively dredging on the weekend. The dredge was about 500 feet downwind from the road adjacent to a levee made impassible by deep soft mud recently placed by the dredge. It appears from the aerial photographs that the dredge is making a second pass down the levee adding additional spoils along the levee centerline.

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