Pigeon Point Lighthouse

After looking at the elephant seals on Christmas Eve, I stopped at a nearby lighthouse. Since it was such a nice day I was hoping to get some great shots of the lighthouse. The Pigeon Point Lighthouse is no longer in use (probably due to satellites and GPS) and is in serious danger of falling down. Luck for us it looked sturdy enough. An interesting fact is that it is named after a ship and not the obvious assumption of the bird. I guess it is true of many light houses up and down the coast.

It was late afternoon when I shot this so the colors were really starting to pop. It was also neat that there was a observation deck built out on a rock on the ocean side. It offered a great spot to be able to shot back towards the builds and the coast with the sun behind me. I can't think of a better time and place to photograph this landmark. I felt luck to be there.

This is another panorama of 6 photos. The black area at the bottom is where I did not shoot photos. So the bottom curve could be considered the rotation path of the camera. The exposure of the sky across the whole pan was too difficult to match in the stitching software so I ended up masking out the sky and replacing it with a gradient based on colors in the original sky. It's very close to the original, just more even. Click on the image for the larger version.