California Photo Scout

The owner of California’s richest Gold Mine and water trader William Bowers built a lavish estate south of San Francisco, naming it Filoli. It is one of the few remaining estates of that period and the only one open to the public in the San Francisco Bay Area. Even Hollywood recognized the potential of this location. They famously featured the mansion in the 1980ies hit TV show “Dynasty” and several feature films, making it one of the best-known secrets in the Bay Area.

The National Trust for Historic Preservation manages the estate with an iron fist. Volunteer enforcers stand by with a head full of facts and policies. They enjoy surrendering countless details and chastising you for accidentally stepping on the lawn or for other small offenses. Manage to avoid the drill sergeants and a Georgian mansion set in a huge 16-acre garden on a 654-acre property is all yours to explore. At least the parts you can see from the official walkways.

The official parts afford you a spectacular insight into the estate of Bowers who lived in a style incomprehensible to most of us. Along the way, you have the opportunity to photograph the mansion and the gardens from the composition restricting confines of well-established paths.

How to get there

Take the Edgewood Road exit from Highway 280, south of the Highway 92 intersection. Turn west until Edgewood Road ends in a T-intersection on Canada Road after about 0.5 miles. Turn right on Canada Road. The entrance to the Mansion is about 1.3 miles north of the intersection on your left.

GPS position

• 37°28’13.87″N 122°18’37.93″W

How to photograph Filoli

The House

Kitchen pots

As you cannot bring a tripod into the house, I recommend not bringing a tripod at all, especially since you cannot visit during the magic hour anyways. One exception would be for macro photography in the garden.

Inside the mansion, this means you will need to work with poor lighting conditions. I prefer to use a wide-angle lens and an image stabilized zoom lens. Like the electronic stability system of your car, the image stabilizer will extend the stable range, but you need to be aware of the limits. Image stabilizers significantly extend the useful exposure time, but you should practice and become familiar with your lens and the exposure times and focal lengths.

Since camera shake is the result of random movements, you should take multiple photographs of each scene. With this trick, you will often find some pictures that turn out well, even when you expose longer than you normally should without a tripod. Whenever I get into a situation where I do not want to push the ISO range or cannot push it any more, I use this as a last resort. In the Filoli mansion, this worked well.

Reception Room

Dynamic range is another concern in the mansion. Light shining through the open windows, illuminating a subject, like the face of the statue above, the windows themselves, and lamps all pose challenges in the surrounding dark rooms. You could expose several different shots and use software to align the handheld images in order to create high dynamic range photographs. However, many indoor compositions with close subjects, like the picture above, would suffer from parallax errors.

Simply expose on the most important elements of your image and learn how much you can push your camera. Taking RAW images, I know that I can overexpose about one stop and still recover highlights. I spot metered on the face, read the settings, and increased my exposure by one more stop to improve the shadow detail.

Boost your ISO sensitivity just enough to be able to shoot handheld, but no more. This will allow you to recover as much shadow detail as possible without creating excessive noise.

Library

Photographing indoors requires more practice. The lighting conditions change quickly and are often poor. You need to change your metering settings, take care of the dynamic range, and pay attention to your depth and your composition. A wide-angle lens makes many of these tasks easier.

Sometimes compositions require patience, especially the ballroom and the long floors. It may take a lot of time to catch a small opening between the crowds, but the resulting pictures are worth the wait. Set up your image, pre-focus, and take a couple of test pictures with people in them. This will eliminate any setup time and increase your chances of success when a small opening occurs.

A few unexpected treats, like the small hidden rooms adjacent to the library, spice up the mansion tour and keep you entertained.

The Gardens

Garden Gate

If you ran out of patience in the house, you will have a hard time in the Gardens. I waited a long time for the photograph above, as one after another walked past me and along the path into the distance. Eventually, I was able to get my photograph, but it nearly cost me my sanity to do so.

There are four good ways around this problem though.

1. Use a wide-angle lens

Wide-angle lenses emphasize foreground elements and push middle ground and background elements into infinity. People thus will be far less dominant in your frame to the point where they become invisible. You need a strong foreground, like a dense flower field, to make this work though. Depending on the season and the actual amount of people, this may not always be an option.

Tree

2. Macro Photography

Rare flowers and a countless variety of species make this garden an exceptional place for you if your heart is set on macro photography. In this case, I would even suggest bringing a tripod and skipping the mansion altogether. You will be happy in this garden and you can easily keep people out of your photographs.

3. Isolate Subjects

Use a longer focal length and isolate an interesting subject. The small round tree, illuminated in direct sunlight and set against a dark hedge, is a good example of this technique. Using a long focal length, I eliminated everything else from this picture, focusing only on shapes and light. A brighter subject in front of a darker subject works better than the opposite, since bright subjects naturally stand out and attract attention.

4. Integrate People

Integrating people into your photos is the most difficult technique due to their erratic behavior. Combined with the isolating technique, this can result in some of the most powerful compositions. Imagine a child touching the funny tree above or a parent and a child looking at a flower together.

pool

Best Time of the Day and Best Season

The Gardens are best during the spring when countless tulips, daffodils, and roses burst into life and paint the gardens in vibrant colors.

The Mansion is open between 10am and 3:30pm Tuesday to Saturday and from 11am to 3:30pm on Sundays. It closes during Federal holidays.

Time required

The Trust, who has little heart for unique compositions, also does not care about good lighting conditions, restricting the opening hours severely. I recommend you arrive shortly after 10am, since you have a lot of ground to cover. Plan at least three hours to see the mansion and the Gardens.

Equipment

• Small Camera Bag or Slingshot Bag
• Wide-angle lens
• Macro lens
• Zoom Lens

Fees

The entrance fee is $15. Seniors receive a $3 discount and students and young children pay $5. You can also choose to become a member, pay a hefty yearly fee, and enjoy free visits whenever you like.

Close Locations

• Devils Slide
• Skyline Blvd
• Stanford
• Half Moon Bay
• Pacifica
• Ano Nuevo
• Pigeon Point Lighthouse
• Roaring Camp
• Big Basin Redwoods State Park
• Capitola
• Santa Cruz Natural Bridges State Beach
• Santa Cruz Pier and Boardwalk
• Mission San Jose
• All San Francisco Locations

Useful Resources

• Official Website

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