The next time you pass through San Francisco, traveling with your camera gear, check out this location called “Alamo Square” at the corner of Steiner and Hayes Streets. The square covers a city block and is one big lawn. Arrive on a winter evening while all the lights of the city are still burning. Find a spot for your tripod along the Hayes Street side of the square looking northeast toward the center of San Francisco. A lens with a focal length in the 100mm range will compress the foreground and background and create a stronger image. Just to be safe, I make this after-hours trip with a few friends.

Stay where you find the best photography and the best sunrises and sunsets. Avoid driving back to Boston every night. All the coastal communities around Cape Ann have a generous supply of lodgings and restaurants. You can find a motel in Rockport that is a very short walk from the Motif #1 Lobster Shack. Several motels on Rockport’s Front Beach have rooms with views over the sandy beach.

From Fort Point, drive east along Marine Drive and Long Avenue. Turn left onto Lincoln Blvd. Follow the map to continue along Lincoln Blvd. winding along and paralleling Doyle Drive. Just beyond Funston Avenue on the right, turn left onto Girard Road which merges into Marina Blvd. As soon as Lincoln straightens out, turn right onto Baker Street. Park anywhere along Baker Street to photograph the restored ruins of the Palace of Fine Arts, part of the 1915 Panama Pacific International Exposition.

Just west of the town of Kaunakakai is the Royal Kapuaiwa Coconut Plantation. Signs warn of falling coconuts. They drop from the tops of the tall trees, well over fifty feet overhead. Heed the warnings. Drive west, just past the grove, and turn onto the short street heading down to the beach. Park at the end and walk the safer route along the water’s edge to find your sunrise or sunset locations on the beach, framed in palms.

About a half-hour west of Washington’s Port Angeles on Highway 101 is eight-mile-long Lake Crescent, every bit as beautiful as Switzerland’s Lake Lucerne or northern England’s Lake Windermere. Lake Crescent is 640 feet deep and the bottom is actually below sea level. Steep, thickly-forested mountains rise straight up from the edge of this glacier-carved lake and very little development has spoiled the shoreline.