Natural Bridges State Beach
2017.10.19
Day Two Hundred and Eighty Eight. I'd been meaning to go to Natural Bridges State Beach for literally as long as I'd known it existed. I have no idea why it took so long to actually get there. Natural arches are one of my favourite things to shoot and this is rather a large one ... in the water! How could it be better? Well, I suppose you could ban beachgoers from getting between my camera and the arch, but that's about it, haha. We went down for sunset and were initially disappointed by the lack of clouds. Thankfully a few came in and the final shot turned out pretty well.
This was supposed to be a day full of exposure stacking experiments. I took dozens of focus-stacked sequences ... and, in the end, deleted every single one of them. Pro tip: Focus stacking really doesn't work with moving subjects (like the ocean). I did manage to pull off a couple of "long draw" images, but had to resort to f/22 to do it. Don't look too closely at them ... everything is a bit soft ... but there's no other way to have that much in focus (without a tilt-shift lens) ... and even then, the two images I did keep couldn't be reproduced with a normal tilt-shift lens because they were taken at 14mm, and as far as I know, no one makes a 14mm tilt-shift lens for Nikon cameras. Canon does make one, but bloody lot o' good that does me, haha.
