Golden Gate Sunset, photo by Harold Davis. View this photograph larger.

It’s been a while since I posted one of my Bay area photos. I’m particularly excited about photographing the Golden Gate: topography, geography, bridge, and mystical engineering.

Recently, for a proposal I needed to find a view of the Golden Gate that showed the city. Of course, I have many of these. But this photograph from Marin Headlands across the Golden Gate from San Francisco appealed to me. I took it last autumn at sunset while exploring the old fortifications with Julian.

I expect the sun to be setting behind the Golden Gate, or at an oblique angle to it. West, after all, is west. (Don’t even get me started about east.) But at first glance in this photo the sunset looks to be setting over the city, definitely not in a westerly direction.

What’s going on is that the sun has set below the horizon. It’s lighting the clouds over the city from behind my position. You can see the direction of light even more clearly if you check out the image in its larger size and note the reflection (pretty small but bright light a star) made by downtown Oakland.