Well - take a look up there at the top of the page where the "Collector Forums" banner flashes.

That's Point Arena. We spent too much time at the nearby retailer "Rollerville Junction" (nice people). The gates to the grounds of the lighthouse closed at 5 (missed it by 10 minutes. On the way from the dealer to the lighthouse, we drove down a narrow road about 3 miles as I recall "Lighthouse Road". I had noticed this spot on the way in. I shot a few other shots through the fence, then quickly doubled back down the road to the view point. I did have a tripod with me (usually don't).

This was shot originally on Ektachrome. I don't recall the ASA but it wasn't fast.

I bracketed through f stops and shutter speeds and was pleased with this one that almost looks moonlit.

For each shot, I waited for the light to flash and tried to capture that during the time exposure.

The lighthouse is rather small in that little image and I cropped it some at the top and bottom to fit the banner size.

The animation was done in Photoshop 5.0. To do that flash, I first cropped and size the photo with the pinpoint of light at the lighthouse. Then I saved that picture as "image0.gif". Next I used photoshop's "Lens Flare" tool, positioning the flare spot where the lighthouse flash was. I used one of the control tools for the lens flare so it was relatively strong. I saved that as "image1.gif". Then using the "fade" tool, I made it somewhat fainter and saved that as "image2.gif", Using the gif animation tool that is part of the Image Composer 1.5 program that is part of MS Frontpage98, I arranged the images in order of 0-1-2-1-0 and set the time delay for each image to operate the flash.

John