Point Bonita by Moonlight, photo by Harold Davis. View this image larger.

By the strong light of a waxing gibbous moon I photographed the outer Marin Headlands coast, looking south towards the Point Bonita Lighthouse, the Golden Gate straits, and the lights of San Francisco’s outer sunset district.

The final image is a composite combined in Photoshop based on three exposures. All three exposures were taken with my Nikon D300 at 56mm using a tripod. The variations were 1 minute at ISO 200 for the darkest areas, 1 minute at ISO 100 for midtones, and 30 seconds at ISO 100 for highlights. I used the in-camera exposure histogram to judge the exposures because the display on the LCD of a RAW image captured in these conditions is inherently unreliable.