Gonzales Blue
Gonzales Bay during blue hour last Saturday, this time looking at the (mostly) new houses on Crescent Road just before it turns down onto Harling Point.
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Canon 5D MkII, Nikkor-N 24mm/f2.8 lens, ISO400, f2.8, handheld, top: 3 brackets, 1/60th, +/- 2 EV, bottom: 6 brackets, 1/15th to 1/640th
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TERRIFIC photos, Ehpem, some of your very best HDRs to-date! Love the dynamic range you’ve found here, showing details and textures from all aspects of the scene. As Ken said, the moon and your partner on the beach add a wonderful touch. These are absolutely fan-flippin-tastic, my friend!!
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Thank you Toad! I love it when flippers get into the comments 🙂 I particularly like the almost black water where its in shadow, especially that top shot.
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What a great view they must have daily (beats my view of…the street)!
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Yup. I have one of those views too, though I am only a couple of blocks from this location and 1/2 block from the waterfront in several directions, my place just feels like the suburbs, and is priced accordingly.
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Looks like it would be an amazing view if you lived there!
Beautiful blues!
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They do have the most wonderful views – Gonzales Bay is quite curved and then across the way are the Olympic Mountains in Washington State which can be amazing at any time of the year. One of my favourite times of the year is when there are 10 or 20 turkey buzzards circling above these houses and the slope behind trying for sufficient altitude to fly across the Strait of Juan de Fuca on their way south for the winter.
As to the blues, I often try to tone them down, but am learning to embrace them when from this time of day as it is what is out there, even if my eyes try to tell me otherwise.
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I, too, like the horizontal composition with the person and the moon leading the eye across the image. Nicely done!
I see that you composited exposures for both images. How did you do the blending?
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Hi Ray, thanks for the comment. My workflow on this one was to import the images into Lightroom 4 where they get a little preset sharpening and tweaking to compensate for my neutral camera settings. Then I exported them from LR4 to Photomatix Pro where I adjusted levels till I had something I liked and exported it directly back to LR4. I then sent the second image the same route, but used the previous settings in Photomatix. Once both were merged and back in LR4 I adjusted some of the levels a bit more (the ones I have more control over there than in Photomatix) and applied those changes to the second image as well, with some minor adjustments to compensate for differences in the original exposure.
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Thanks, Ehpem. I like how realistic your HDR images come out (as opposed to the comic-like pics that are all the rage). I have not messed around much with Photomatix. Will have to take a look!
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It takes quite a bit of messing around to figure out how to get a natural look, though there is a LR4 plug-in that works with Photomatix Pro which automatically generates a 32bit file to work on in LR4. It is a great place to start for that natural look, with edits done in LR4. However, it creates a very large file (on my system with dng files being input, the 32bit files are 100 to 120meg each. Which chokes my computer, and fills the hard drive awfully fast. But, does allow great images. I don’t use it too often, but instead go through photomatix and create jpegs that way.
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Looks pretty upscale in these photos. The inclusion of the person on the shore and the moon in the first photo is striking. Really nice!!!
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It is very upscale. Nearly the whole waterfront has been rebuilt in the past decade. Old houses, or beach cottages as many were, sell for 1.6-2 million and are torn down and replaced with multi-million dollar structures. Some are absentee owners – oil patch types from Alberta, or Americans, who visit a few weeks or months a year. I generally prefer to look out at the beach, but this was a pretty captivating scene. All that high tech bluish-green window glass adds something too.
The woman standing is my partner, patiently waiting (as it turned out) to show me a storm drain in the sand that neither of us had noticed before (pictures to come).
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