Driver's Dream: Wide

I've always had a list of locations worldwide that I want to visit or revisit and photograph. Contained within the list is a subset of locations where I want to create ultra-high-resolution images. Some of the locations have been on the list for many years but as it turns out, 2024 was a good year for me, as I visited four of the locations on my ultra-high-resolution "hit list". Those locations were 1) Manarola in Cinque Terre, Italy, 2) Bryce Canyon, 3) the slot canyons of Arizona, and 4) a little-known loop in a mountain road about a 4-hour drive Northeast of Vancouver, BC. You can look for my VAST images from all four locations on this website.

In the case of that mountain road loop, I finally got there in late August 2024. When driving west across the Canadian province of British Columbia, the city of Kamloops is about halfway. From there, the quickest route to Vancouver is about a 4-hour drive, which is a drive I have taken many times. But there is an alternate route. Travelling Highway 99 involves a 6-hour trip along a road with uncountable sharp curves and huge elevation changes. It was on this route, starting at the town of Lillooet, that I headed out to find the big loop. The loop was impossible to miss. Not only does the sharp curve have long approaches on both sides, but also involves quite a bit of elevation change, starting high in the west and ending low in the east. I knew I would be on location until after dark, so I first secured a nearby campsite to spend the night. With that taken care of, I headed off to find the best viewpoint overlooking the hairpin turn. It is a short uphill hike to get near the top of the lookout, but the last bit of elevation gain was a little sketchy. But standing at the top of the lookout and finding a place with a relatively unobscured view to set up a tripod and special VAST equipment is another thing. Let's just say that I spent 3 hours on a very precarious rock outcropping to capture the 1000 photos required to assemble this image. Oh, and yes, climbing down in the pitch dark was not so much fun.

If you are familiar with how the very large VAST images are photographed and assembled, you know that many "zoomed-in" photos are taken across the scene and then combined to create one image with a wider view and incredible resolution. However, this technique prohibits the capturing of objects moving across the scene, as the camera needs to be moved to an overlapping position before the next "zoomed-in" photo can be taken. To create an ultra-high-resolution image that included the light trails of moving vehicles, I had to come up with a creative solution. Using a telephoto lens, I first captured nearly 1000 images that would be assembled into the ultra-high-resolution image. I then switched to a wider-angle lens with a field of view that covered the entire roadway, and as darkness fell, I used long exposures to capture as many photos as I could of the light trails of cars coming and going along the road. In post-production, once I had assembled the 1,400-megapixel image, I turned my attention to the light trail photos I had captured. From those photos I selected the best one that showed headlights approaching, trail lights departing, and of course, some brake lights on the crazy curve. I then used that one photo with its light trails as a model to faithfully recreate the exact same light trails in the ultra-high-resolution image. The result is an ultra-high-resolution image that accurately represents the beautiful car light trails that were captured on the loop.