Embarcadero waterfront at night

Over roughly the past year, I’ve started taking regular walks along San Francisco’s Embarcadero waterfront, sometimes simply because I want to get outside and loosen up after a day at work. Since winter brings such early sunsets, I’ve also been using the darkness as an opportunity to experiment with nighttime photography using my new iPhone 11 Pro Max. Here are a few images I captured during those walks along the waterfront.

Pier 7

Pier 7 is a public walkway extending into the bay, with a wooden deck and traditional-looking light fixtures. It has become a popular location for wedding photography, as well as for people hoping to spend some time fishing in the bay. After sunset, the warm artificial light creates an entirely different atmosphere from the one seen during the day.

Surprisingly, the old-fashioned-looking lamps and wooden decking are not nearly as old as they appear. They were actually added in 1990. Before that renovation, the pier had served as a conventional commercial pier with a concrete surface.

There is one detail in this photograph that I find particularly distracting: the small green spots appearing near ground level beneath the lamps. I suspect they are an optical artifact caused by the material of the phone's lens.

San Francisco Belle

Seen from Pier 7, the San Francisco Belle has an appearance that could easily make you imagine a vessel from one of Mark Twain's stories.

Its history, however, is considerably more modern than its traditional paddlewheel appearance suggests. The ship was constructed in 1994 as a floating casino. It was later relocated to San Francisco, where it was given a new purpose as a venue for dinner cruises and corporate functions.

View from the Exploratorium

The reflection visible in the upper-left portion of this photograph gives away the fact that the image was taken through glass. More specifically, I photographed the San Francisco skyline from inside the Exploratorium at night during one of its After Dark events.

The image also demonstrates how dramatically a thin layer of clouds can stand out after dark. Even a relatively small urban area can illuminate clouds from underneath, making them appear surprisingly bright against the night sky.

Buckyball

The Buckyball is a sculpture resembling a soccer ball enclosed within another soccer ball. It was installed outside the Exploratorium in 2016 and is particularly hard to overlook after dark, when the LEDs inside the structure are illuminated.

The same strange green optical artifacts that appeared in the Pier 7 photograph can also be seen here without much effort. When viewed from farther away, the glowing spots can almost look as though they are intentional elements of the sculpture rather than artifacts produced by the camera.

Bay Bridge and a Yacht

The Bay Lights were shining brightly across the Bay Bridge while a brightly illuminated boat, which I believe was a yacht, moved toward the bridge.

The sky behind the bridge has an almost painted appearance. My guess is that Apple's Night mode was responsible for this effect, quietly combining several exposures into a single image. The resulting picture is not entirely accurate, but in some ways it seems closer to how the scene actually appeared to the human eye than a conventional, unprocessed photograph would have been.

Wolf Moon Beneath the Bay Bridge

The previous night featured the “Wolf Moon” lunar eclipse in the Southern Hemisphere. The eclipse itself was not visible from our location, but the rising moon still produced a striking effect. For roughly an hour, moonrise cast a strong orange glow across the northern sky.

The moon frequently appears larger to our eyes than it does when captured by a camera. When it is positioned beside something built to a human scale, such as the Bay Bridge, however, the difference between its perceived and photographed size becomes much less noticeable.