First Trip To Mt Tamalpais

The new year started with our first trip to Mt Tam.  Although you can see it from our neighborhood (header photo), it takes about an hour and a half to get there because of narrow, winding roads.  We'll go back!  It is a beautiful location but this first visit didn't do it justice.  We arrived late in the day and rain moved in over night so we left in the morning.  Still, I got a couple of decent photos and learned an important lesson...

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After a shelter-in-place Christmas week "Zooming" with family and friends, Andrea asked me on New Years morning (sitting in the hot tub with mimosas), "Is there anything you want to do today?"  After thinking, 'well, it's snowing in Yosemite,' I decided Mt Tam, 20 miles up the road was more doable.  Since we've never been there, we packed up the van and headed out for a "one-nighter."

​Passing through the higher elevations we encountered some light fog rolling in.  At the top we could see that heavier fog was pushing through the Golden Gate as usual.  We could see the northern part of the bay but not the city itself, so being above the fog, we just took a walk and enjoyed the sunset over the ocean beyond the fog bank.

We were within the boundaries of state park but had not passed through any entry gates so we were not sure where we would be allowed to park the van overnight.  We opted to park in a pullout right at a nice overlook and see what happened.  After dinner and a game of cribbage, we noticed that the fog was dispersing a bit and the city lights had come into view so I got my tripod out and here's where things went bad.  I could not get a good photo to save my life!  Everyone of them recorded camera movement no matter how carefully I set the tripod, how gently I pressed the shutter release, or how long I set the mirror-up delay before the shutter would open.  I recalled having this problem once before and solving it by changing lenses.  Although I didn't know just why that would make a difference, I chalked it up to the new lens being a shorter focal length and therefore allowing better results at slower shutter speeds.  Unfortunately, I had not brought any other lenses with me this time so I finally just gave up.

"image stabilization motors in lenses can INTRODUCE movement if the camera is already very stable"

After returning home, I was obsessed about finding the movement problem.  I could not find the throw-away photos from the last time I had the problem because... I guess I deleted them.  Go figure!  So I turned to the lens manufacturer's forum where I learned that I'm not supposed to use the lens's image stabilization feature if the camera is already stable!  Apparently my lens was recording the movement from my pushing the shutter release and attempting to offset that even though I kept taking more and more precautions to have absolutely no movement when the shutter actually opened.  To top it off, at first I wasn't even that careful about pressing the release since I knew all movement would stop before the exposure.  A few of the images where I was super careful about tripping the shutter release turned out to at lease be salvageable but another trip to Mt Tam is now essential!