This Korean Friendship Bell is a little hidden gem located in San Pedro, California. It is pretty well known amongst locals but not so much to tourists visiting California for the first time. I had been living in California for a little over two years at the time when I had made my first venture over to this spot. Unfortunately it took me forever to find it the first time because I didn’t have a GPS at the time and was trying to read directions while on my motorcycle (which is definitely not advisable to do), and I didn’t end up arriving until it was pitch black out. I still took pictures here anyway but there were some crazy spotlights on the structure that gave it a crazy color cast and just made the image on a whole unattractive. So, needless to say, I was pretty excited for this visit. I arrived here about an hour before sunset so I could have enough time to explore. There were a few people here but fortunately they came and went pretty quickly and they became increasingly more sparse the closer it got to sunset. I scouted out the area from different vantage points and I hadn’t quiet decided on one perfect spot so I took shot from several. The one pictured here is what I decided on as the best after looking at them on my computer. This is actually two pictures that are vertically stitched together, well…more like 6 because they are two HDR images. I really tried to tone down the HDR in this one so that it only complimented the photo subtly rather than giving it any sort of funky look or oversaturated colors that seems to be prominent among HDR images. Most of the work for this image was put into correcting the lines to make them all straight and making the whole image symmetrical as well.
