Golden Lines

Behind the Camera - Golden Lines

I’ve photographed the Golden Gate Bridge hundreds of times. Different days, different seasons, different weather, different hours, different cameras, different lenses, and from almost every type of viewpoint I can get to. Sometimes I arrive with a photograph already in mind, and other times I just go back because the bridge never really looks the same twice.

Fog can completely remove half of it. Strong sun can flatten everything. Early morning can make the structure feel almost empty, while later in the day the traffic, people and changing light create something completely different. I’ve photographed it while walking around it, driving toward it, stopping at viewpoints, exploring both sides of the bay, and looking for angles that make me see something I haven’t photographed before.

After taking so many photographs of the same landmark, the challenge is no longer simply to photograph the Golden Gate Bridge. It is to find another way of looking at it.

For Golden Lines, I concentrated on the structure itself. I used a tight composition so that the tower fills most of the frame, while the suspension cables create a series of vertical lines across the photograph. San Francisco is still visible in the background, but it is secondary. The bridge becomes less of a postcard landmark and more about engineering, repetition, scale and the details that are easy to overlook when you are looking at the entire structure.