Zooming Downtown San Diego, CA
Today I would like to tell you about a lesser-known location where you can get amazing pictures and videos of downtown San Diego, CA in the United States. It's called Bayview Park and it's right on San Diego Bay, just across from downtown. It has stunning views of the city skyline as well as all of the activity on the bay. Plus, Bayview Park is next to a Navy base, so it provides a front row seat to military ships and aircraft. And perhaps best of all, it has... large shade trees that provide a break from the hot San Diego sun.

In this article, I'll tell you about my experience at Bayview Park and I'll show you some sample photos at different focal lengths so you can get a sense of the images that you can capture with whatever lens you bring with you when you visit the park. If you want to see video clips instead of photos, then you can also watch my video on YouTube. The video has even more super zooms than this article!
The focal lengths of the pictures in this article range from 24mm to 3000mm. I'm able to cover that wide range because I shoot with the Nikon COOLPIX P1000 super zoom camera which has an optical zoom range of 24mm to 3000mm.
THE LOCATION
Bayview Park is located in a residential area in the city of Coronado, CA. It's a very small park, comparable to the property size of most homes in the area. With such magnificent views in the city, it's really special that this land is open to the public for everyone to enjoy.

The park is directly across the bay from downtown San Diego. That puts the edge of the park at about 4,200 feet or 1,280 meters away from the closest tall building in downtown. That's less than a mile or about 1.25 kilometers. This relatively short distance is great if you have a telephoto lens because less atmosphere to look through means less atmospheric distortion and that results in clearer pictures.

THE BUILDINGS
As I mentioned above, I travel with the Nikon P1000 which is a super zoom camera. With the P1000, I can frame almost any subject from any distance. But Bayview Park is close enough to downtown San Diego that you won't necessarily need a super telephoto lens to get great pictures of the buildings. It depends on the intended subject of the image that you want to capture.
Let's look at some examples photos at different focal lengths by zooming in to the top of the Park Place building. You can see where the Park building is by following the arrow in the picture below points.
A lens with a focal length of 24mm can provide an establishing shot to show where the buildings are in relation to the park.
At a focal length of nifty 50mm, you can frame all of the buildings in the heart of downtown San Diego.
If you want a picture of a small group of buildings then you might want to use a focal length of about 200mm. A 200mm lens might also be a good choice if you want to show a specific building in the context of its surroundings.
By the way, now is probably a good time to mention that I am apparently incapable of taking a level picture. The buildings in most of my pictures were leaning to the left or to the right a little bit, so I leveled those pictures in post-production. And that subsequently required a little bit of cropping. I thought it was important to level the pictures because buildings that lean to the left or the right are unsettling, especially in California!
OK, back to the focal length discussion. If your goal is to capture an image with an individual building as the subject then I recommend a lens with a focal length of between 300mm to 500mm. Just a reminder that in this series of pictures, we are zooming in to the top of the Park Place building. If I wanted the Park place building to the subject in the 500mm picture below, then I would have panned down to frame the entire building.
If you want to see what's on the roof of the buildings, then it's best to use a lens with a focal length of 1000mm or more. Unless you are shooting with a super zoom camera, reaching these focal lengths will likely require a teleconverter.
In case you were wondering, the structure that looks like a house on top of the Park Place building is actually the building's penthouse. It's kind of strange to see what looks like a house on top of a building that's 300 feet (90 meters) tall!
I tend to write about using super zoom or super telephoto focal lengths, but I was able to capture a lot of images of downtown San Diego from Bayview Park with focal lengths of 200mm to 400mm. This focal length range tends to work well for things in the downtown area that are closer to the bay.
Here's a picture of the San Diego Convention Center taken from Bayview Park at a focal length of 255mm. By the way, see the "Know Before You Go" section below on how to improve this image :)
And here's a picture of the Tuna Harbor area at 275mm.
SHIPS AND PLANES
The San Diego Naval Air Station is right next to Bayview Park, so there are a lot of ships and planes in the immediate area. Ships traveling between the air station to the open ocean do not travel in front of the park, but ships heading (apparently) to the other Navy base further inland on the bay do. I saw two large ships the morning that I was there.

Navy aircraft also fly around the area near Bayview Park. I saw mostly helicopters and Bell-Boeing V-22 Osprey flying over the bay. The Osprey can fly like a fixed wing aircraft and it can also take off and land like a helicopter. Here's a picture of an Osprey flying over San Diego Bay toward Naval Air Station North Island.

There are some Navy piers just to the West of Bayview Park. Let's run the focal length numbers on a Navy ship that is docking at the pier. The picture below taken at 50mm shows three ships. The aircraft carrier is parked at the pier that is the furthest away (I think that's Pier "L"). The ship with hull number 153 is docking in the middle parking spot. And there is commercial ship in the parking spot that is closest to Bayview Park.
It looks like you'll need a focal length of at least 200mm to frame the entire ship, depending on its orientation relative to the park. The more "head on" it is, the longer the focal length you'll need.
At 500mm, you can start to get good close-up shots pictures of the ship.
It seems to me that the subject of pictures taken at around 1000mm is the sailors on the ship. In fact, this picture got me wondering about the different colors of the hard hats that the sailors are wearing. I did some internet searching and found that the colors indicate each person's role on the ship. Crewmen with blue hats are members of a team that perform a specific operation on the ship. People with yellow hats are petty officers for a particular function on the ship. And the white hats are worn by officers, supervisors, safety observers and medical personnel. At least, that's what the internet told me.
We can see the crewmen better at a focal length of 2000mm.
And at a focal length of 3000mm, we can see the faces of some of the crewmembers on the ship. I say "some" of the crewmember's faces because only a few or even just one face might be in focus in each picture. This is because the field of focus at an extreme focal length like 3000mm is extremely narrow.
In the 3000mm picture, the face of the crewman wearing the blue hardhat is in focus. Although, you might need to view the picture on a large screen (not your phone) to see the detail.
You'll have to wait for most military ships to cruise down the bay in order to see them. But there's one military ship that you can see at any time when you're at Bayview Park. It's the USS Midway aircraft carrier museum on the other side of San Diego Bay.
You'll need a focal length of at least 200mm for the aircraft carrier fill the frame of the picture.
KNOW BEFORE YOU GO
Here are some thoughts to consider before you visit Bayview Park.
Other than the magnificent view of downtown San Diego, Bayview Park has one thing that I love at an outdoor photo shoot... SHADE! There are large eucalyptus trees growing in the back half of the park that provide a wonderful break from the sun when you're capturing photos and videos for a long period of time.
But to avoid getting other park visitors in your shots, you'll need to spend some time up near the water where there are no trees. So be sure to put on sunscreen or where clothing that shields your skin from the sun.
Not only are there no trees out by the water, but there isn't much to lean against to stabilize yourself when shooting handheld. There are a couple of concrete benches near the water, but if you're going to be shooting with a long lens, then you might want to bring a tripod. All of the pictures in this article and the video clips in the video that you can watch at the end of the article were shot using a tripod.
We should probably talk about parking. One of the reasons that Bayview Park tends to be less busy than other parks in the area is that there is no designated parking area for cars. You'll have to park alongside the roads in the surrounding neighborhoods. I was there on a weekday morning and had no problem finding a parking spot nearby, but I'm not so sure that would be the case on a busy weekend. And just a heads up that you'll have to parallel park on the street :)
The picture below was taken just outside the park on 1st Street.

There will likely be a lot of light entering your lens when you're at Bayview Park because (1) it's usually a bright sunny day in the San Diego area, (2) the buildings tend to reflect a lot of light and (3) the bay, is like a giant mirror reflecting sunlight. Therefore, you might want to bring a Neutral Density (ND) filter to stop down the light a bit.
I didn't bring an ND filter when I went to the park and you can see that some of the pictures are a little washed out. I don't think too many stops are needed for an ND filter. Just keep in mind that ND filters can cause some vignetting when a zoom lens is at its highest focal lengths. Here's an example of a picture that I took at Bayview Park that would have benefited from a neutral density filter.
To take pictures and record video of downtown San Diego from Bayview Park, you will be pointing your camera to the northeast. In the summer, the sun rises a little north of east and in the winter the sun rises a little south of east.

We all know that morning light is beautiful, but at this photo shoot location, sunlight in the morning will be coming from behind and/or to the left of the buildings. As you can see in the diagrams from SunCalc, the morning sunlight in the middle of the summer will backlight the buildings and morning sunlight in the middle of the winter will cause the west side of the buildings to be darker than the east side. It all depends on the look you're going for, but you might find that the light later in the day is better as the sun moves behind you.

Watch the Video
I hope that this article provided you with some helpful information about taking pictures at Bayview Park with the lens(es) that you have! I also published a video about taking pictures and videos from Bayview Park on my YouTube Channel which you can watch by clicking on the picture below. The video has some other super zooms of the buildings, ships, aircraft and people that you can see from the park.

Thanks for reading this article and watching the video! You can also check out some of my other articles and videos below. Or you can browse through all of my articles.

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