Benicia, California
8 Sep
While out shooting in Wine Country over the weekend, I made a stop on the way back to my hotel in Benicia, an industrial city on the edge of the Bay Area that I keep coming back to.
There was a spot I had in mind that I saw the last time I was there with dozens of pipes of various sizes snaking along the contours of a hillside. When I went to scout it out, I discovered that since the last time I’d been through the area, a brand-new 10′ tall chain-link-topped fence had been erected where I was hoping to shoot.
Not to be deterred, I went back to a favorite spot of mine underneath the Benicia-Martinez bridge, and started hiking around that area.
I loved the way the shadows from this bridge came into focus on the water, blurred from the long exposure.
This is a Northbound Amtrak Coast Starlight from Los Angeles to Seattle. The 4-minute exposure was more than enough time to capture the entire length of the 14-car passenger train:
This is a dock used for unloading crude oil from tanker ships, or loading finished gasoline back onto them:
Here’s the underside of the Benicia-Martinez bridge. It’s a 5-minute exposure, the streaks in the sky are stars:
Here’s that oil terminal again. This is the base of the pipe system I was trying to shoot earlier in the night:
On the way back, I got lost and wound up in an abandoned warehouse district. It being almost 2am by the time I left and without the energy to keep shooting (it was cold, too), I decided to make a mental note to return the next time I was on the north-eastern edge of the Bay Area.
