More little planet waves

At the beginning of the summer, I told myself I'd do more photos of the beaches here. I live on an island, so the beaches should be one of the first things I'd take photos of. But of course, until tonight, I haven't so much as set food on the beach.

But tonight, Victor and I went out to Dead Man's Bay. The lighting was very beautiful while we were there as the sun had just reached the point where the bay was in shadow. I took some photos from up on the cliff above the rocks, but it wasn't really doing it so we went down to the water.

When I saw a little island of rock out from the rocks a bit, I got the idea of doing a little planet photo. Note, when shooting on a beach, make sure you know what the tide is doing, and if you're going to be caught by it.

When I got out there, I put on the 10mm and started shooting from the tripod. But then I remembered that my tripod was not level, and that's no good. It's imperative to keep the tripod very level when doing a 360 panoramic.

Once I got that sorted out, I did a 360 sweep. I shot at 5s, f22, and ISO100. This blurred the waves a ton and gave everything a nice glow. I really love how the ocean fades away to white and the sky is completely blown out. It's photographically incorrect in some respects to have no sky, but following the rules never promotes creativity.

For editing, I used PTGui to create the panoramic, then continued to Lr for editing. I brought out the shadows a bit more and upped the clarity. I then cropped everything so that the planet was very large in the image. I lowered the highlights  and raised the blacks a bit to. Overall, this compressed the tonal range so that there was more detail in the mid tones while still preserving the overall contrast.

To fix the hole in the middle of the photo (because you can't shoot straight down on a tripod), I used the stamp tool and just copied other parts of the rock. The trick is to not use parts of rock as a whole, but layer multiple parts over each other using a hardish brush so that you create a whole new rock texture.

Finally, there were some inconsistencies with the horizon. To fix this, I copied part of the horizon onto a new layer, then warped it to fit over the weird parts. Basically just used the stamp tool on a new layer, and then warped that layer to fit the curve of the horizon.

And for the rotation, I made sure to take a look at all the different angles I could use before I made a decision. It never hurts to asses all you options.

See you tomorrow!