In January I’d gone out to Pigeon Point to shoot the lighthouse, only to discover that they close the tunnel and the bridge in the middle of the afternoon. I hung out on the coast and got a couple of sunset shots I liked, then came back toward the city through that one lane tunnel that leads to the north entrance to the Golden Gate Bridge.
I stopped off to shoot the GGB from one of the usual spots, and got back to the truck around 7:30. I noticed on the horizon a weird, orange glow that got brighter and brighter. It looked like a second sun rise. I took a couple of pretty awful pictures of it, just because the intensity of the light was so surprising. Sure enough, it was the moon, starting to fade slightly as it came into view.
I had nothing in the foreground to use, nothing except the distant outline of the Berkeley and Oakland hills. So I drove across the bridge back into the city and looked for something nice to place in the frame. I found a spot around Hyde and Filbert to take this shot. It’s a composite, of course, as the moon is just a bright, white glow if you set the exposure to show anything on earth, and to get any detail of the moon itself, San Francisco is pitch black. So I made two exposures, then stacked them and revealed the properly exposed moon in Photoshop.
