Bahia Honda Bridge: Crumbling at Sunset

Road to Nowhere:  Bahia Honda Bridge

After wonderful day at the beach, nothing can be better than a wonderful sunset.  I had planned to take photographs of the crumbling bridge at Bahia Honda state park.  There are several wonderful photographs of this location at sunset.  In general, these are taken from the east, looking into the sunset.  I figured that I would do the same.

I arrived more than one hour before sunset and hiked up to the edge of the old bridge.  Looking into the West, there were no clouds at all.  The skies actually looked very bland and boring.  I immediately had a decision to make: should I stay here and try to make something out of nothing or should I leave?

I decided to leave go to the west end of the bridge, hoping that the different angle of light might improve my circumstances.  Looking to the east, there were some lovely clouds.  As the sun got lower and lower, these took on a lovely yellow color with a hint of pink.  The bridge took on several different colors including orange, gold, yellow, red.  It really was a remarkable sunset.  I took several photographs that are very outstanding.  However my most favorite photograph was a composite of 2 exposures.  Using a telephoto lens I took a picture looking down the center of the bridge.  Because of the small focal plane intrinsic to telephoto photography, the entire scene cannot be captured in focus with one exposure.  Instead I took several to get the foreground and background sharply in focus.  These have been blended into the photographs you see above.

In thinking of the title, I wondered about "the road to heaven"but seeing that this road was really crumbling and broken I decided to use "Road to Nowhere."