Golden Gate, Wildflower Season. From Cypress, Stone, and Sea.
September 28, 2026
You have seen this bridge a thousand times. Postcards, film posters, the lock screen on somebody’s phone. That is the trouble with a famous view. Your eye recognizes it and moves on before it ever really looks.
This one has lupine in it. A whole slope of it, in bloom. The flowers are what slow you down, and the bridge is just what happens to be standing behind them.
Nobody planned that color
Construction started on January 5, 1933. The steel showed up wearing a coat of red lead primer, the dull orange you put on metal to keep it from rusting before the real paint goes on. Irving Morrow, the consulting architect, passed it on his way to the site and could not stop looking at it.
So he ran color studies. He ruled out black, which he wrote would be unattractive and would shrink the bridge more than any other color. He ruled out aluminum, which would leave the towers without substance and make them look tiny. Warm grey finished second. Orange won because it blended with the hills behind it and stood apart from the ocean and the sky.
The bridge opened to people on foot on May 27, 1937, and to cars the next day at noon, when Franklin Roosevelt pressed a telegraph key in the White House. The main span runs 4,200 feet. The towers stand 746 feet above the water.
How it was made
Late March, 2022. Twenty eight millimeters, f/8, 1/320 second, ISO 100, no exposure compensation at all.
Those numbers tell you the light. A shutter that fast, at f/8, with the sensor at its least sensitive setting, means there was a great deal of it. Open coastal light. Nothing rescued afterward.
f/8 is also where a lens like that is at its sharpest, and sharpness is the whole game in a frame built this way. The flowers sit close to the camera. The bridge sits far off. You want both of them to hold.
A lamp instead of a knife
Light does more in medicine than let us see. On September 14 the FDA approved a gel called Ameluz, used together with a red light lamp, for superficial basal cell carcinoma in adults. You spread the gel on the lesion and wait. The fastest dividing cells take it up and turn it into a compound that reacts to red light. Then the lamp goes on, and the light does the work.
The trial behind the approval put 187 adults through it, and nobody knew who had the real gel and who had a placebo one. Twelve weeks later, 66 percent of the people treated with Ameluz and the lamp were clear on both the clinical check and the tissue check. In the placebo group it was 5 percent. On the tissue check alone, 76 percent against 19.
This is the first photodynamic therapy the FDA has approved for any skin cancer. It covers the superficial kind that sits on the surface, not the deeper tumors and not melanoma, so the scalpel is not going anywhere. But if you have a handful of lesions on the face you meet in the mirror every morning, a lamp instead of a knife is not a small thing.
FROM THE COLLECTION
Cypress, Stone, and Sea follows the coast from San Francisco through Monterey and Pebble Beach and down into Big Sur. Fourteen pictures. This is one of them.
If you look after a room where people sit and wait, write back and tell me what the room is like. What the light does in it, how long people stay, what they stare at now. I will tell you honestly whether anything here belongs on that wall.
Richard
Sources
Golden Gate Bridge, Highway and Transportation District, Color and Art Deco Styling, Key Dates in Bridge History and Design and Construction Stats.
Biofrontera, FDA Approval of Ameluz Red Light PDT for the Treatment of Superficial Basal Cell Carcinoma, 14 September 2026, with independent reporting in Dermatology Times and HCPLive.