Okay, so there was a reason I went down to the bay on my last night in the Bay Area, to that beach where I usually take the pictures of all the dogs… and to pet them when I miss my dog.

I was playing with my telephoto… zoom… lens, as you might have been able to tell from the first picture.

Look, you can actually see the old civil war-era fort, under the big arch at the South (left) end of the Golden Gate Bridge.

But I also went down there to play with something else. No… not that… why you gotta be like that?

I found a tripod at a rummage sale… four dollars… and I wanted to try taking pictures of San Francisco as the lights were coming on. I had mixed results, as you will see from upcoming posts. It turns out that, if you have a big telephoto lens, and zoom way in on a distant object, any small wind is enough to blur the picture… but not as much as some of those dancing-light-ball pictures I have shared before.

It worked great for most of the shots I took.

And the sunset was pretty.

Well, you will see what I mean tomorrow. Here is one last photo that came out pretty good, especially when you think back to the post I did where I tried to take photos of the lunar eclipse. Holding the camera in my hand, it felt steady. I just got those crazy photos of multiple moons dragging trails across the sky. But check this one out…

That is the moon. I think the light side was too bright for a good picture, unless I was better with the camera and knew how to set the exposure… because at night, in the dark, the shutter wants to stay open a long time, and the camera can’t move at all. But if you look at the middle of the moon, you can actually see craters. How cool is that?