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This shot works in all sorts of weather. Since it benefits from a lot of traffic, rush hour or weekend evenings is a good time to find enough traffic to provide tail lights but not so much that it moves too slowly. You can adjust aperture and film speed to get the right exposure time for the traffic speed. If your exposure is too long, the traffic can disappear altogether. Follow the directions below to a point where you can place a tripod so that you can line up the north and south towers of the bridge nearly perfectly. For this shot I used a large tripod fully extended, in order to get the camera about 5 1/2 feet off the ground, to get above some vegetation.

A major spoiler of this type of photo is ghosting - the appearance of phantom headlights and street lights at a position symmetrically opposite of the actual light source in the image. Such ghost images are the result of surface reflections in front of the lens aperture. Quality lens manufacturers do what they can to design against this phenomenon by multi-coating the glass surfaces inside the lens. Different coating thicknesses of different materials, such as magnesium flouride, with different indices of refraction do a good job of preventing internal reflections of different wavelengths of light thereby reducing ghosts. Cheap lens filters are not multicoated, and greatly increase the occurrence of ghosts in this type of photo. While expensive filters are sometimes multicoated, adding another surface of glass at the very front of the lens can completely spoil the picture. This isn't an indictment of the filter maker; it is just a matter of physics.

Access

From San Francisco, take the last San Francisco northbound exit off Highway 101, just before the bridge. The exit sign reads "Golden Gate National Recreation Area View Area". At the stop sign turn right (Vista Access Road) and then in 150 feet another right at the next stop sign, Lincoln Blvd. Follow Lincoln Blvd for .25 miles to the stop sign at Merchant Road. Turn right on Merchant Road and go about a tenth of a mile to a dirt parking lot on the left (northwest) side of Merchant Road. Battery Godfrey will be in front of you. At this point there is a small hill on the right (southwest) side of Merchant Road that will get you up another 15 feet above the roadway.

Traveling southbound, proceed through the far right toll lane #1 (west side). Take an immediate right exiting Highway 101. Continue through the stop sign on Merchant Road. Follow Merchant Road about .1 miles and park at the dirt parking lot on the right side of the road just before it curves to the left. Follow additional directions above.

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There is usually enough light, even in fog, to hand-hold this shot with a 200 to 300 mm lens. Since the point of this composition is not the traffic but the weather - specifically the bridge towers disappearing into fog, I framed this shot a bit wider than the one above.