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Pigeon Point Lighthouse (2010)
Central Coast, California
Pigeon Point Lighthouse is
one of the most beautiful lighthouses on the
coast of California, probably the most
beautiful.
It’s what I grew up thinking a lighthouse
was supposed to look – tall, slender, graceful.
We were fortunate in that a
storm was sitting just off shore.
It would rain on us later that night and
the following morning.
But for sunset, we had beautiful clouds.
The challenge of
photographing a sunset is to not overexpose.
You need to underexpose by a stop, maybe
two, especially in conditions like this.
You want to capture a dark, brooding
feeling in the storm clouds.
Another exposure decision is how to treat
the lighthouse.
There are basically two choices –
photograph it as a silhouette or use HDR and try
to capture some detail in the foreground.
I opted for the silhouette look.
The lighthouse and rocks are rendered
virtually pure black.
They make for a nice composition of
shapes in the fore and middle ground.
I watched the histogram for clipping.
I didn’t try to eliminate it all because
the sun was so bright.
But the clipping was limited to the red
channel.
That’s OK because there isn’t any detail
in the disk of the sun.
I didn’t opt for a long
shutter speed.
I wanted to see the waves as they came in
instead of the silky effect of a multi-second
exposure.
A telephoto lens
accentuated the size of the sun while framing
the elements of the composition in a tight,
pleasing pattern.
I was able to zoom in tight enough to
mirror the lighthouse with the rock on the left.
I didn’t worry too much about the rule of
thirds.
The horizon fell pretty much in the
center of the image.
I was more interested in getting the
light house placed high enough but not too high
in the frame.
If I were to do this again I would
probably move to the right a little to place the
sun just to the right of the jutting rock
instead of to the left.
I think that would add even more balance
to the image.
The post processing was not
difficult.
This is a situation where most of the
drama and impact of the image is already
captured at the time the shutter is tripped.
I just made sure the silhouettes were
solid black, the sun was bright but not too
bright and there was interesting detail in the
clouds.
There was a bright band of sky along the
top of the image that was a huge distraction.
So I cloned in a darker cloud to keep the
image intact and the eye from wandering out of
the frame.
A little vignetting around the corners
and the photograph was complete.
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