San Francisco Moonrise, photo by Harold Davis. View this image larger.

I learned from my friend Steven Christenson that the full moon would rise shortly after sunset, in theory lined up from Battery Yates on Fort Baker directly behind the Transamerica building in downtown San Francisco. Steven posted a note to the same effect with the Bay Area Night Photography Meetup group—and when I got to the site there was already small crowd of night photographers gathered, cameras and tripods ready. This was night photography as a kind of group sport, and the companionship was fun while we waited for the moon to rise and added layers to protect against the chill.

The alignment of the moon seemed more or less as calculated, however the line of clouds kept it from appearing quite as low in the horizon as I would have liked. By the time it broke the clouds it was above rather than behind the Transamerica tower as you can see in the shot.

I used a 400mm lens (600mm in 35mm terms on my D300). To keep camera shake down in the breeze—a serious issue with this long a lens—I hung my camera back on the center pole hook as a weight. I also boosted the ISO to 400, taking the trade-off of a bit more noise in exchange for a faster shutter speed to reduce softness from camera motion. I shot the moon at 1/30 of a second and the foreground at 1/2 of a second, and combined the two exposures in Photoshop.

Exposure data: Nikon D300, 400mm, 2 combined exposures at 1/30 of a second and 1/2 of a second, each exposure at f/5.6 and ISO 400, tripod mounted.