A later magazine profile of Worden noted his participation in the Spanish-American War, which "interrupted his art studies just when he was preparing to go to Paris to complete them...leaving brushes and palette behind... among his equipment was one of the smallest cameras then to be had.

The thirty-two halftones mounted on black construction paper provide "an extraordinary travelogue of the city before the 1906 earthquake, while demonstrating the photographer's mastery of his craft within a few short years of his arrival.

[10] As the city began to rebuild, Worden's time was divided between commissions to document various construction projects and expanding his retail line of picturesque landscapes and seascapes.

[12] Calling his work "art photography," Worden produced hundreds of shoreline views, with sailing ships, seagulls in flight ("exquisite beyond description"[4]), and beachgoers set against an endless variety of cloud formations and atmospheric conditions that he sometimes enhanced in the darkroom.

A number of his contemporaries explored similar subject matter on both the east and west coasts, but what set Worden's 'dunescapes' apart are their high horizons and relatively tight cropping that emphasize the sinuous windswept patterns in the sand.

[16]) As preparations were underway for the Panama-Pacific International Exposition, set to open on February 20, 1915, Worden took advantage of his accreditation as an official photographer of the event to use his large-format cameras to record the PPIE's architectural and sculptural marvels.

"His nocturnal photographs were particularly successful in capturing one of the PPIE's major technological innovations: its state-of-the-art illumination, which included concealed arc lamps to make the buildings glow at night and batteries of spotlights, searchlights, and projectors to highlight architectural details, pennants, and individual pieces of statuary.

The spectacular lighting was enhanced in a number of Worden's photographs by its reflection in wet surfaces, an effect he deliberately captured by setting up his camera equipment after heavy downpours had partially flooded the walkways.

The entrance featured an ornate entablature with the words "Art Photos" and "Worden," and a sculpture by Edmund Senn depicting a female "personification of photography," a camera, and a putto with a palette.

Required to list "merits claimed for articles exhibited" when applying for the booth, Worden wrote: "Artistic composition in negatives, selection of view point, light, and atmospheric conditions to produce striking and pleasing pictures.

Worden sent out engraved invitations "to announce a permanent exhibition of Art Photographs," featuring "California in all her moods, with all her physical charms, vividly represented in colors direct from nature.

In 1926, the San Francisco Chronicle announced Samuel McCall as director of the "new Willard Worden Galleries," which increasingly showed paintings and prints by other Bay Area artists.

His assistant Teresa Glenn reached out to Catherine Harroun, director of the Wells Fargo History Museum, which agreed to archive and preserve hundreds of Worden's negatives.

"Although the modest memorial disregards his civilian accomplishments, it sits on a gentle slope overlooking the ever-changing conditions on the Bay, the Marin Headlands, and the Golden Gate Bridge, serving as the ideal resting place for a photographer who spent so much of his career exploring the scenic possibilities of his adopted city.

"At their best, hand-colored prints from Worden's studio could be exceptionally delicate and refined, yet this method was looked down upon by such members of the photographic intelligentsia as Stieglitz and Weston as a cheap corruption of the medium.

[32] The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco also published a companion book of the same name, with a ground-breaking biographical appreciation of the photographer by James A. Ganz,[33] who told a reporter, "Worden had a refined eye for the Bay Area’s particular beauty.

Perhaps because they more closely hew to accepted notions of fine-art photography, his uncolored prints tend to bring higher prices than his "old-timey" but unfaded hand-colored landscapes and seascapes.