Pigeon Point Lighthouse

Pigeon Point Lighthouse is one of my favorite places to make images. It is often right at the threshold between the persistent cloud layer that forms above the San Francisco peninsula, and the sunnier skies further south. When I drove up to it, a thick cloud layer had formed and began spreading south and the lighthouse was already hidden under a thick layer of deep-hanging clouds. I was hoping for better conditions at sunset and parked at Gazos Creek Año Nuevo State Park, which is just a minute south of the lighthouse, in order to be able to come back quickly and create some images. As I walked along the beach and looked for compositions looking south, I tried framing this rock in the foreground. This is when I noticed that I had a pretty good view of the lighthouse from there and took some images with it in the background. Fortunately, I had brought the 70-200mm lens I was testing, which made it easier to compress the scene, but focus was an issue. The image you see below is a focus-stacked composition of two shots. The light was almost completely flat, except for when the the clouds occasionally thinned overhead, which allowed a small glimmer of a shine to appear on some of the waves.

Pigeon Point Lighthouse