One idea that Paul had was for us to have a go at shooting some light trails at SFO after it got dark.  This sounded like a good plan.  Unfortunately, we didn’t have any tripods or cable releases with us.  No matter.  Target was around the corner so we popped in there and bought a couple of $15 specials.  Hmm, these were quality items indeed.  Given how much a good tripod costs, can you imagine what a $15 tripod is like?

However, we made the best of it.  Getting perfect alignment was tricky so some post processing cropping to level stuff up would be required.  The camera wobbled a lot on the tripod when touched so I chose to trigger it with the shutter button on a 2 second delay.  This allowed some wobbling to stop and, on a long exposure, any lingering wobble would be lost.

We got some stuff but it wasn’t brilliant.  However, a short while later, I had to go to SFO to pick up some family members arriving on an evening flight so I decided to go a little earlier and try again, this time with some more appropriate kit in the form of a decent tripod and a cable release.  This time, I was able to control things a bit better and get a few shots of interest.  There wasn’t a huge amount of traffic so I didn’t get too many trails but I did get a slowly taxiing British Airways 747 which left an interesting smear across the frame.

The alignment with the moving planes is not fantastic from where I was but it was okay.  Coyote Point looks like it might be better but I think it closes at sunset so I’m not sure whether that will be possible or not.  We shall see.