Category: Landscape

I’m still a long way from having all the images processed from my trip to the coast. But I did like this impressionistic view of the Sandy Creek Bridge from the trip over. My inner critic keeps telling me the subject it too close to the center but I couldn’t part with the pretty winter trees on either side of the bridge. Similarly, from a composition view point I would like to lose the piece of sky in the upper left corner but not enough to sacrifice the trees to cropping.

In post processing I edit out some trash in the foreground and some signs near the bridge. Then I did my usual tricks in Color Efex Pro (detail, saturation, warmth, darken edges.) Then I took it into Topaz Impression for a Van Gogh filter. I don’t know much about art techniques or Van Gogh but I keep coming back to this particular preset in Impression because it keeps things pretty realistic but at the same time softens the harshness of reality.

Is there ever a bad sunset at the coast? This one was shot with a telephoto lens which I later regretted being my lens of choice as the whole sky burst forth in color after the sun sank below the horizon. Tonight, a wide angle!

In this image I was trying to celebrate the backlighting of the sun on the spray blowing off the breakers. The sun is setting just to my right but I wasn’t able to get it and the rocks and the breakers all in one shot.

In post processing I took it into Color Efex Pro where the detail extractor helped clear up some of haziness around the rocks. I used a perceptual saturation filter in brilliance warmth to give me a wider range of colors than just the golden of the original. And finally, a lighten center filter to give it a little more depth.

And now it is time to go out and catch the morning light.