China Camp State Park Then and Now

Photo: Old Historic Shrimp Fishing Village and Female Sunbather, China Camp State Park, California

Clearly I prefer color photography but there are certain situations where color can be a distraction. For this image of the last remaining Chinese shrimp fishing village in the San Francisco Bay Area, I wanted to juxtapose the historical aspects of the China Camp fishing village with the modern day site being used as a recreational park.

The best way of converting color images to black and white is quite easy. All you have to do is open the photo in Photoshop and use the "Channel Mixer" adjustment layer then check the "Monochrome" button. The image will turn black and white with the slider at 100% Red, 0% Green, and 0% Blue. Those values correspond to the type of B&W filter that you would use if you were shooting it on film. Each image responds differently to the color values so you should experiment with the sliders. The important thing is to make sure those three slider values add up to about 100% when you are done.

For this image, I used 100% red to simulate the Red B&W filter effect. What this does is create a stark black sky where there was originally blue, and accentuate the high contrast on anything else of a lighter color. Ansel Adams used this filter often and very effectively for his most famous images. Of more subtle detail is the female sunbather being juxtaposed in color. I just masked the channel mixer layer out of the area around the woman.

To see a bigger photo, click here.

San Francisco Summer Fog

On Saturday morning I met up with photographer Jim Goldstein in San Francisco. It was foggy everywhere so we went to the Fort Point area and the Presidio for a few hours to try shooting some "mood" type of shots. I wanted to get a lone fisherman silhouetted against the foggy Golden Gate Bridge but the fog layer was a little too high to capture that effect.

Our other stop was at the pet cemetery. There were some very nice, colorful flowers blooming. I think I got a shot or two that I am happy with.


Photo: Presidio Pet Cemetery, San Francisco, California

After lunch, I decided to go up to Mission San Rafael because Jim and his wife suggested it would be the only place on my to-do list that wasn't foggy. They were right. It was about 85 degrees there. The Bay Area is very unusual in that you can drive a mile or two and have a thirty degree change in weather.

Mission San Rafael Arcangel is a 20th century replica of the original at the approximate location. Probably because the chapel is only about 60-70 years old, it didn't have the ambience that most of the other missions have. Though it was a replica, it looked like a newer church. A baptism was about to start in the chapel when I got there. I had never seen one before so I guess that was enlightening. The new mission church next door was having a wedding so I took a few pictures there before leaving for nearby China Camp State Park.

In the 1870's, the San Francisco Bay had a large group of Chinese shrimp fishermen that were very efficient at what they did. Discrimination and the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 eventually killed off the Chinese fishing industry in the bay. All of their fishing camps disappeared with the exception of the China Camp village.


Picture: China Camp State Park Shrimp Fishing Village, San Rafael, California

The village was dilapitated but it had some interesting displays in the visitor center. The buildings there were very worn but looked very authentic still. I didn't talk to anyone there but awhile back I read that a chinese family descended from the original group run the cafe and oversee the village. I found that to be interesting because those original chinese fishermen came from the same Guangdong province in China that my ancestors did. Not many people in America nowadays speak my family dialect but almost all of the older generation of Chinese-Americans did. I'll likely return to China Camp in the future to photograph during better lighting conditions. I'll be sure to do my research beforehand so I could ask some questions of the people there. The last thing I want to do is be under-informed and sound stupid while asking questions. Plus I'm not exactly the most articulate person in the world.

The fog was still hanging around the SF Peninsula so I decided to give the Marin Headlands one last try at sunset. I'd been up there four previous times during the trip at sunset but it was either clear or the fog was too thick to see anything. Getting a photo of the Golden Gate Bridge shrouded in fog is something that I'd wanted to photograph for the past five years. I'd gone up to the Headlands several times when I was living up north but was fogged out each time. The one time it did look nice was during the middle of the day when the bridge is not very golden.


Photo: Golden Gate Bridge Summer Fog, Marin Headlands, California

These 15 hour days of summer are brutal. To wake up at 4:30 a.m. in order to drive somewhere to get a sunrise shot, shoot five or six locations during the day, then have dinner at 10 or 11 p.m. is very exhausting. Those who think that travel photography is easy aren't trying hard enough.