photo spot

A couple weeks ago, I had the opportunity to go and photograph the old train station (on 16th street) in Oakland,CA. This train station was abandoned in 1994, when the newer train station was built. For over 50 years, this station was the main train station for the city of Oakland, CA. It connected the Pacific Railways to the local elevated electric tram. Think of this: in 1912, Oakland already had an elevated electric tram. There is almost no furniture left but the main hall is beautiful and so photogenic. The building is a private property, you can’t trespass but there is a couple of meet-ups that regularly organize private days there. It’s really cheap and you get a good 90 minutes to explore the building (almost by yourself). Here some of my...

This year was supposed to be a rainy year here in San Francisco, so I was planning a raining shoot. I was looking for a rainy, grey-ish day where my model was wearing the only color in the image. It was raining quite hard on Sunday, we found the streets of San Francisco quite empty. You too can get your own photoshoot session! Contact me. If you want to receive these posts by email, you can subscribe to my mailing list. All the images presented here are available for licensing or as fine art...

Friday evening, my wife and I went to see the exhibit of Ai Weiwei on Alcatraz island. We choose the evening tour because it let us combine the exhibit and an a photoshoot of the city with the Christmas light from Alcatraz. The tour boat left at 3:20pm with plenty of time for looking at the exhibit before the sunset at 4:51pm. December is the best month to go to Alcatraz to photograph the city’s christmas lights. It’s a unique vintage point and relatively close. I love doing panorama of the city while there. You need to sign up for an evening tour otherwise you have to leave the island before 5pm. Only evening tour people can stay and take the last boat of the day at 6:40pm. One of the side benefit of seeing the @Large exhibit is the fact that it is...

Last weekend I joined Frederic Larson’s meetup in Napa to photograph hot air balloons. The balloons are flying almost daily over Napa but on a nice weekend, you can have as many as 10 balloons in the air at the same time. Meetups are a great way to do things you would not otherwise think of doing. My favorite quote from Frederic is: “If you don’t change something, how could you expect different results”. My interpretation is: if you always wake up at the same time, you will always end up with the same photographs. Change you wake up time and see something different. So for this meetup, we woke up at 4:30am, in order to be in Youtville by 6:45am. From there, we carpooled to the launching spot where a fair number of balloons where already...

Death Valley National Park is far away enough from cities that it requires a three day weekend to go visit. But that’s the point, Death Valley has some of the most amazing sky you will ever see. That’s because there is no light pollution, the air is very dry, no clouds, perfect for some night photography. Our plan was simple, leave Friday night from the Bay Area and come back Monday night, lodging was also simple: we would camp. We’ve been to Death Valley once before and specifically to the Racetrack, so we had a good idea of what to expect. This time I was interested in getting deeper into Death Valley by following some of the off road trails. In order to do that and being safe, we had two 4WD cars with high clearance and we would follow each...

The Golden Gate Bridge is like  few monuments in the world (Eiffel tower in Paris, the statue of liberty in New York, the opera house in Sydney, the burj khalifa in Dubai), it’s an iconic symbol that almost everyone recognizes instantly. It’s also extremely photographed and making a unique image of the Golden Gate Bridge is almost impossible. I have a strong attraction for this bridge and the map below that shows the GPS point of where I took my images reflects that fact. I have shot the Golden Gate Bridge at night, at sunrise, at sunset, from a boat, from a helicopter, from a car and there are still images in my head I want to make that have not happened yet. View San Francisco Photo Spot series: The Golden Gate Bridge in a larger map The...