Highway 1

It’s Independence Day, 4th of July, so I thought it might be most appropriate to post a photograph taken in the good ol’ US of A to mark the day.  While I’ve been to the US on a few occasions now, it was really only on my last trip (my honeymoon!) that I had a good quality camera with me.

That’s not to say I didn’t get some good photos on previous visits to Boston, New York, or during an enjoyable summer spent in Cape Cod on a J1 visa – it’s just that all those photographs were taken on a film camera, and I have yet to scan and digitize any of them, though that is somewhere on the to-do list.

So today I’m posting this photograph of the Californian coastline, taken from Highway 1, which has to be one of the most scenic drives in the world.  As I said, I was on honeymoon with (obviously!) my wife Aoife, and having had a blissful week in the luxury of the Sheraton Resort in Hawaii, spent a lovely few days in a sunny San Francisco, and enjoyed a little slice of luxury in the Sonoma valley, we were on our way to Carmel, south of San Francisco, and taking the scenic route along the Pacific coast to get there.  If that wasn’t enough of a treat, we were travelling in a convertible Mustang.  Bliss.

While I had expected California to be lovely, having previously only visited the more urban parts of the east coast, I never thought it would be quite as scenic as it was.  As we drove along the coast, we rounded a bend and this view opened up in front of us, and we had to stop to take it in (and take a photograph).

The beauty of this scene was all due to the mist hanging over the rocks, and the challenge therefore was to photograph it with the correct exposure to keep that in the image.   If I kept the camera on an automatic exposure, it would struggle with this.  As I’ve written about before, when calculating an exposure, a camera tries to get the scene to an 18% grey, and so with this scene it would likely have underexposed due to the light mist dominating the centre of the frame.  Instead of using exposure compensation, which is where you override the camera a little and nudge it in the right direction (effectively saying to it “a little brighter, please” or “a little darker, please”), I just took over and set the exposure manually.

That was easy, thanks to the LCD screen and the histogram which gave me instant feedback on how the exposure was looking.  As it was a landscape shot, I wanted as much to be in focus as possible, so my starting point was to set a small aperture.  With that set, I played around with the shutter speed until things looked good, keeping the ISO at 200 to minimize noise.

Incidentally, as it happens, the exposure was exactly in accordance with the sunny-16 rule – at f/16, shutter speed = 1/ISO on a sunny day.

With the photo taken, it was onwards towards Carmel for the last few days to conclude an enjoyable few weeks in California.