Limekiln State Park
2012.10.20
Day Ninety One. Limekiln State Park had been on my "get to" list for a long time. The only real thing stopping me from getting down there was the drive. It's one of the southernmost parks in Big Sur, and there's just sooo much cool stuff north of it that's closer to get to that I just hadn't made it down there yet. Well, I finally did and was really worried the entire drive down. It had been sunny when I left Pacific Grove, but as soon as I hit Big Sur, the fog made itself known in a very serious way. I kept hoping to drive through it, but sure enough, by the time I got there, the fog had only gotten thicker. I thought the entire day was going to be a wash until I set up my first shot and realized that the fog was knocking enough light out of the sky to allow me to get long shutter speeds (30+ seconds) without having to pull out my ND filter. Given the success of the HDR experiment at Asilomar, I decided to continue shooting sets of bracketed images. It's a good thing there wasn't anyone with me though, because it took way longer than it should have to set up every shot and shoot all five frames for each image, and that's when I didn't get half way through the third or fourth exposure before deciding to recompose. When I finally got the images back to process them, I found that all but only a small handful of the HDRs all looked like complete rubbish. The perfect lighting conditions provided by the fog meant that the HDR composites had massively blown out colours. Luckily though, since the process of creating an HDR image is simply the good photographic procedure of bracketing, I got nearly perfect images generally with the +1 exposure. In the end, I only kept two of the HDR composites and despite the significant increase in processing time required, I'm extremely pleased with how this set turned out :)
