From San Francisco to Vancouver: The Blissful road to happiness, Redwood National Park

Last summer, I did the first long road trip of my life alone. I left San Francisco, Ca and drove to Seattle, Wa in 7 days. A few weeks before, I had read an article in the National Geographic on Redwood National Park. So, I decided to go through the park, hike a few trails and most importantly get a few amazing photos of this place.

It was a beautiful day of fall in California with no clouds in the sky  and the sun was starting to go down. I was driving on a beautiful scenic rout towards Klamath, Ca, meditating on the power of visualization as a way to get what I want from my life. As I was going through my memories, I realized that most of the photos that I love were the result of that (mostly) unconscious (at the time) process. I was also thinking I had never taken a photo of golden rays of light coming through the trees. I had seen these photos a few times and I had a clear image in my mind. I then decided to hold that thought and keep feeling how it would feel to take that particular photo.

As I was going through the curves of Highway 1, I was going uphill when this vision became reality, I was amazed by the beauty of the scenery, it was pure perfection, a moment of pure blissfulness, I hit the brakes immediately and did a u-turn to park so that my car would not be part of the image. I then took my time to put the camera on a tripod, select the right lens and position myself in the middle of the road and snap the 7 exposures necessary to capture the scene with as many details as possible.

The final image involved manual blending between a DRI (also manually blended) of -2,+1 and +3 exposures and an HDR of 7 exposures (-3 to +3ev) from Photomatix.

Here is the result (Nikon D300 – Tamron 17-50mm – ISO 200 – 17mm – 1/160 to 0.4s exposures):

Each time I look at this photo, I feel blissful and happy, hence the reason I named this photo  “The Blissful Road to Happiness“.

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Photos and videos are all rights reserved – David Giral 2010.