In January of 2017 I brought in the New Year with two close friends in the far away land of California - it was my first time spending the holiday outside of Texas and, despite my nostalgia for the Lone Star State, it was unforgettable - I'd be hard pressed to say that I wouldn't want to live there full time; it's just too beautiful to decline. The variety of terrain along the California coastline was absolutely spectacular and one stretch in particular, Big Sur, was simply too good to pass up; I had to photograph it.
My two friends - handy tour guides that they were - drove me to their "secret" vantage point of the famous Bixby Creek Bridge on Highway 1 just before sundown so that I could get to work. My plan was simple: capture Big Sur in a way that no one had before. Straightforward enough. I was currently obsessed with taking large panoramas, so starting there was an easy choice. Next was the more difficult task: finding a way to artfully use every source of light around me. I've always liked light trails from passing cars, and I love the smooth look that lengthy exposures gives to moving water, but capturing them all in the same frame as a sunset is practically impossible (light trails and smooth water require long exposure times...sunsets, well, don't). Lucky for me, rendering a large panorama meant a lot of exposures, so I would be able to fit multiple different exposure lengths into one photo. Problem solved (ish).
To capture what I wanted I used a series of neutral density filters (glass that decreases the amount of light that reaches the camera's sensor) so that I could use the light around me as I preferred. The whole ordeal took about two hours of composing, capturing, recomposing, and so on to end up with the 10 photos that I used to create this panorama of Big Sur (my two friends played chess in the car while they waited for me...nerds).
The final product took about 16 hours of processing after the fact (there is no program to automatically stitch together long exposure panoramas - I had do do it manually), and the size and complexity of the files crashed my computer numerous times along the way (I'm getting a new computer). End result: A 10 shot, differential exposure capturing a field of view of more than 180 degrees of the California coastline that houses the Bixby Creek Bridge, the setting sun, moving cars, and crashing waves all within a single frame of panoramic proportions.