Too Busy Exploring

Victor and I went out to South Beach tonight for the sunset. There were a few clouds on the horizon, so I thought it might be an okay sunset. Usually, the best sunsets are with low cloud cover. The sun reflects up onto the clouds, and color goes evvverrryywherrreeeee.

Unfortunately, the sunset was one of those mediocre ones. Very yellow and the clouds obscured the sun too early for the good colors. The water didn't get very much color either, so it was kind of meh.

However, Victor and I were busy exploring the beach. The rocks down there are just amazing. The tide was really high, and with a slight onshore wind the waves were pretty good sized. There were tons of log bridges between different rock out cropping, and we quite enjoyed playing on those while the waves crashed underneath us.

When I actually did get around to shooting, the couple scenes I tried weren't all that great in the colors or lighting. With the sun down, the water was pretty flat, and the exposures had to be fairly long. Long exposures aren't bad for water though, I bracketed them starting at f/22, ISO100 and .8s. The other two were at 1/5s and 3.2s, I bracketed at + or -2 stops.

Editing was a little tricky, I used a combination or luminosity masks and layer masks to blend the exposures. The the sky, I first made a luminosity mask of the bright areas of the sky (this included the clouds) and then painted in the darker exposure. This replace the blown out sky with a darker, richer one. However, the blending wasn't too great. I went back and created a looser mask, and then painted that one in again over the first. This gave a softer blend. I think shooting at +-2EV was a little extreme, so blending the exposures was difficult. In the end, the sky doesn't look half bad, but it's not quite what I hoped.

Next came the water, I had my middle exposure combined with the darker sky so far. I added in the lighter exposure of the water with a black layer mask, then painted in (with a very soft brush) the areas I wanted the water to show up. This was mainly the rocks and around them. I did not paint out into the more open water, because this area was very over exposed and not very natural to blend with the sky. It took quite a few attempts to get the position right of the mask.

Next, I made two clipped adjustment masks for the sky. Clipping masks only affect the layer under them, which was the sky layer. I added more saturation, and darkened it a little bit. Nothing fancy.

I the set my black and white points using a threshold adjustment. This is a pretty simple concept, just ensuring there is a full range of contrast in the photo. I set the curves adjustment to luminosity, so that it wouldn't effect the colors.

However then I duplicated it and applied the color changes to the sky and some of the open water. Finally, I added a curves to lighten up the rocks a little bit.

In Lr, I added lens correction and sharpening. Nothing I haven't written about before.

See you tomorrow!