San Francisco Auto Show & The City at Night

It has been a really long time since I have been to the San Francisco Auto Show. As a matter of fact, I don't think I have been to this show since I was a kid. But, this past Saturday, we decided to make a family day trip to the city to check out the show and have dinner downtown. I was armed with my Canon 5D Mark III camera and 24-105mm lens, while my son had a 5D Mark II and my wife and daughter had their iPhones.

The Auto Show is set up to show all the current models of cars available, but from a photographic perspective, I really liked the vintage cars which were on display.

Due to the mixed lighting and numerous distractions around each vehicle, I decided that tight shots would be the most pleasing. So, I spent most of my time getting down low, getting in close and looking for interesting details in these classic cars.

I really loved the color and lines of this Lincoln Zephyr. This is a shot taken of the front side of the hood of the vehicle.

This was my favorite image from the auto show. For this photo, I got close to the hood ornament and metered the camera to darken the exposure, thus emphasizing the chrome details. I did remove a couple of small light reflections on the hood of the vehicle, which were distracting.

On the show floor, they had a couple of auto designers showing how they draw up concepts. One guy was using a Wacom Cintiq while the other was drawing freehand. My wife saw this shot before I did and took a nice photo on her iPhone. I liked it enough to grab the same image. Good job Annette. :)

I think I will have a V8.

Very cool front end of a 1932 Stutz.

I photographed most of the cars from straight on, but then decided to frame things a little differently.

Such cool hood ornaments, from back in the day when people wouldn't steal them off the cars. :(

Now that is a grill.

This is one of the last shots that I took from the auto show. I framed this shot to highlight the hood ornament against the cherry red car in the background.

After the auto show, everyone was hungry, so we went for a late lunch / early dinner at Tony's Pizza Napoletana in the Italian district in SF. Awesome pizza to top off a fun day. I was hoping that we would get served quickly, because I knew that sunset was at 5pm, and since it was a rare clear day in the city, I really wanted to drive over to Treasure Island (located halfway across the Bay Bridge) and take photos of sunset over the city.

As luck would have it, we got out of the city just in time to catch the last of the sunset over San Francisco. So beautiful!

This is the last light of the day, with the Ferry building, the Embarcadero buildings, and the Transamerica pyramid in the foreground.

During the holidays, all of the Embarcadero buildings are lit, which makes the skyline even prettier.


After catching the amazing sunset, we headed for Union Square in SF and checked out the outside ice rink.



Even though I have been hearing holiday music in stores since Halloween, I can now start to accept that the holidays are upon us. All the decorations are up and everyone seemed to be in the spirit.



I think this is Macy's way of saying that they believe in holiday sales.



Right before leaving the city, as we waited to cross the street to the parking garage, I saw this Cable Car coming towards us. I quickly raised the camera, changed the settings to get a 1/2 sec exposure, and did a slow shutter motion pan along with the trolley.