Chrome Bay

Chrome Bay captures the beauty of the San Francisco Bay and its associated bodies of water. The images by Max Clarke, who has photographed  the Bay Area for decades, reveal the wide range of light in the sky and on the water: a golden foggy sunrise, green ocean waves, silver-blue fog, dark gray storms, clear orange-and-blue sunsets, even bright blue days.


While Chrome Bay brings new light to popular sights such as the Golden Gate Bridge, it primarily takes the reader to locations and moments which are rarely seen by visitors, and infrequently seen by locals. Readers will see fog "on fire" at a sunrise on Angel Island, deep red salt evaporation ponds near San Jose, the Green Bridge of Alameda, gasoline rainbows in Emeryville, and a white rainbow in Marin County. Chrome Bay will look at the largest camera in the Bay Area -the size of an office- built on the edge of a cliff above the Pacific. Readers will enjoy visiting Watermelon Rock, near the Oakland International Airport.


Max Clarke also shows us life and traffic on the water: the lone kayaker paddling from Sausalito to San Francisco, the gargantuan cargo ships and oil tankers, the white pelicans of Lafayette Reservoir, a tugboat in the cold morning fog, pleasure craft anchored outside a sunny baseball game at AT&T Park, and a vulnerable seagull walking through traffic in the Oakland rain.


Readers will be delighted by the photographs in Chrome Bay. They will admire the ways light and water spontaneously create magical scenes which we can discover and appreciate.