Its history is inspiring. Its setting is beautiful. Getting there is just as enticing as being there. The views are nothing less than spectacular.
Note: The cover photo is a shot of Yerba Buena Island.
This was a fun shoot. The commander of my VFW post, Mike Gilmore, is a docent on the island. He invited me out for a visit one weekend. Angel Island is a State HIstorical Park with limited facilities, so you actually need a reservation to go there. They’ve done a ton of restorations to some of the structures on the island. In its history the island was a Miwok fishing village, an immigration center with a not-so-nice reputation, and a Military base that served as both a WWII prisoner of war camp, and a jumping off point for soldiers headed to the Pacific Theater. You can read a little of its history here: Angel Island
So, Mike invited me out with him on a weekend when he was scheduled to do some volunteer work on the facilities. I had the run of the island and made good use of the time. If it was up to me, I’d have stayed on the ferry boat and rode around the island all day. The views were spectacular.
This was a fairly large shoot. In 2022 I was pretty good at this photography thing and most of the images I made came out good enough to print. So, selecting images for this post was hard. I trimmed from 350 to 50, then to 40, then finally to 31. On the way back to the mainland in Tiburon I caught Pelican diving for fish.
There are several images each of the Bridges, the city, Alcatraz, and one of a neighborhood on the bay in Tiburon. I wonder how many millions those places cost???? I didn’t include most of the the images from on the island as they were all focused on the old Army base and I didn’t think was relevant to this post. There is a friendly resident coyote who greets arrivals to the island.
This was fun to shoot and easy to edit, which is almost a disappointment to me. I love the processing end of the hobby, and when I do well enough in camera, its almost boring just going through the basic motions to prepare them for publishing. Its fun trying to match what your mind’s eye thinks it remembers to what comes out in post processing.
Since I shoot in RAW format, at the very least, I have to convert the image to JPEG for Social Media, the blog or even for printing. The act of opening the file in Lightroom or Photoshop automatically puts me in nitpicking mode and I’ll look for something to edit or remove or highlight, etc. Possessed by a pixel-peeper I am.
I hope you enjoyed and remember, Popi luvs ya.
