Big Sur at Sunset and Beyond
2012.11.23
Day Ninety Four. Made a quick trip down to McWay Falls for the sunset. The light was super harsh and I overexposed literally every single picture I took before the sun set ... so yeah, I'm still learning how to use the ND filter and properly expose images ... after getting over the fact that I'd thrown away a majority of the set, I was pleased to find that my post-sunset shots came out rather well. I even managed a half way decent moon shot. On the drive back up, we stopped north of the lighthouse to play with some super long exposure. The first, really grainy image is actually a High ISO test shot, but I liked it so much, I ended up keeping it. The second, nicer looking one is a 16 minute long exposure, technically my first star trails image, and also my introduction to hot pixels. If you zoom in to 100% on the full-sized version, you'll see all sorts of fun coloured pixels which are very much so not supposed to be there. Unfortunately, the only thing to be done about hot pixels is learn how long you can leave the shutter open on your particular camera, and never exceed that length of time again (unless you want to go around spot correcting thousands of miscoloured pixels). The last image is my first intentional attempt at start trails. I had little to no idea what I was doing, but dare say, it came out rather well :)
