In this special mid-winter event, a beam of light from the setting sun fires over the Pacific Ocean through this natural tunnel.
Limited edition: no more than 100 prints will be made at each size/medium.
Artist: David R. Smith
Location: Big Sur, California.
I arrived several hours early to capture this shot. When I turned on my camera, the battery was dead. I had another battery but I had brought the wrong camera bag with me, so I headed out frantically looking for a shop to sell a battery. There aren’t any shops selling specialist camera batteries in Big Sur, so I went back to the beach to pick up my family. When I arrived, a bunch of photographers were setup waiting for the beam to appear. I tried putting my battery back in the camera, and amazingly it worked. As the battery had been in my pocket, it had warmed up and gave me enough juice to shoot a full roll of film. Disaster had been averted.
Metering this shot was very difficult due to the intense light in one area and darkness in all the other areas. I metered using a hand held light meter pointed at the sand. When the film was developed, I was pleased to find that the metering technique did the trick.
Camera: Mamiya 7ii
Rangefinder 6×7 Medium Format
Lens: Mamiya 80mm
Minolta IV F Auto Light Meter
Media: Fuji Provia 100 ISO
Digitized with a drum scanner
Processing: Less than 5 minutes of color correction and cropping in Adobe Lightroom
