Yesterday I took a day trip over to Vancouver Island to meet a photography friend, and we took in a small part of Highway 14, along the south coast of the island. The south coast of Vancouver Island is beautiful, and also has the benefit (or drawback) of always having the sun shining on your subject (and camera).
Despite being such beautiful weather, the lighthouse was completely deserted -- possibly a factor of it not being obviously signposted from the main road. You could walk all around the lighthouse very easily, which provided some interesting viewpoints of the water on the nearby rocks, but in order to get to this viewpoint you needed to go slightly off-piste and cross a quite overgrown meadow.
I usually prefer to shoot lighthouses at dawn or dusk, but sometimes you have to make do with the light you have. This shot was taken with the sun almost at its highest point, resulting in a very high-contrast photograph.
It was relatively windy on this point, which was causing the clouds to move quickly across the sky. In order to capture this motion I used my 10-stop ND filter. To control the high level of contrast in this shot, I processed this using HDR, with four exposures ranging from 8 to 60 seconds.
This is shot at 16mm, so is very wide angle. In order to take this shot I needed to get right to the edge of the rocks with my tripod.
Worth viewing large!
Apologies for being behind (even more than usual) on commenting, and for not posting much recently either!
I'm a British software developer and photographer living in Vancouver, BC. I mainly photograph landscapes, cityscapes, night scenes, and water.
If you're interested in any...
Love this shot. I really must get to Vancouver again. My first experience of Vancouver was 11 years ago and it was not so great so have put off going back. I'll get to it one day ☺
