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Zane Paxton | all galleries >> Galleries >> Pigeon Point over Time > Lighthouse
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27 August 2006 Zane Paxton

Lighthouse

Pigeon Point Light Station, California

The maddening thing about a shot from this high vantage point is that the horizon ends up in the middle..... so, what to do here? When I was walking back from the viewpoint, this scene presented itself. In order to catch it all, this is a 2 scene wide panorama that I stitched back together with a program called PTGUI.

By doing this, the lighthouse has a more extreme placement which gives it a lot of visual importance. The visual foil (or balance element) for the lighthouse becomes the rocky chasm which is slightly deeper porportionally in the image than the lighthouse it tall. One's eye is then pulled back and forth between the lighthouse to the chasm, then back up to the horizon and back to the lighthouse. There is no resting place for the eye, perhaps a metaphor for the lighthouse that always has its "eye" moving across the horizon...

Nikon D2x ,Nikkor 17-35mm f/2.8D ED-IF AF-S
2 shots stitched together into a Pano 1/60th @ f/5.6 ISO 200 full exif

other sizes: small medium large original auto
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