Point Arena Lighthouse

Point Arena Lighthouse is one of the views that make any trip up the North Coast of California worth the while. It is absolutely breathtaking at all times of the day. This trip was more of a scouting exercise to determine what subjects I wanted to return to and give a full treatment. I will be making a trip back up the north coast specifically for this view. The above is a down sampled image if a 300 Megapixel HDR panorama.

I only allowed myself about an hour to explore this location but after taking my test/scouting shots I couldn’t help but notice the birds swooping down between my position and the lighthouse. I thought just for fun I would try and see if I could catch one of them perfectly positioned with the lighthouse in the background. I set the 5D Mark III to AV mode, AF to center zone, AI Servo for tracking, ISO-400 to ISO-800 for maximum shutter speed. It turned out to be harder than I thought but I did get a few fairly successful shots. Here is one of them. Under these more than ideal lighting conditions the 5D Mark III definitely kept up easily with half the shots. I still missed the 7D’s amazing AF tracking capabilities however. Still this is a very powerful lens and body combination.

For this location I shot with the Canon 5D Mark III and the Canon EF 70-200mm f/2.8L IS II USM. For the second half of this session I added the EF 2X extender III.