San Francisco is one of the most photographed cities on Earth, and yet somehow the bureaucratic obstacle course required to capture it from the air keeps getting more absurd.

A local drone photographer recently set out to shoot the Palace of Fine Arts at sunset — a simple enough ambition. Except when the Giants are playing at Oracle Park, a three-mile no-fly radius kicks in. The Presidio? Also restricted airspace. That leaves a narrow sliver of sky sandwiched between two federal no-go zones where you can legally hover a camera. The photographer threaded the needle and came away with a stunning, never-before-seen angle of one of the city's most iconic landmarks bathed in golden light.

The result is genuinely breathtaking. As one Bay Area resident put it, "Spectacular. I can see the tippy top of my beloved Mt. Tam. This is why we love our Bay Area." Another local called it "an angle I've never seen before."

But let's talk about what it took to get there. We live in a city where you need to consult an FAA map, a baseball schedule, and a National Park Service overlay just to take a photo of a building that was constructed in 1915 for a world's fair. The airspace regulations around San Francisco are so layered that a hobbyist with a consumer drone has to play three-dimensional chess with federal agencies before pressing the shutter button.

Look — no one is arguing against reasonable safety rules near stadiums full of people or military installations. But the patchwork of overlapping restrictions has become a case study in regulatory bloat. When a photographer has to find a geographic loophole just to document a sunset, maybe it's time to ask whether we've optimized for control at the expense of common sense.

The good news? The photo is gorgeous. San Francisco, for all its red tape and restricted airspace, is still impossibly beautiful — if they let you see it.

Sometimes the best things in this city come from finding the cracks in the system.