Wednesday, December 22, 2010

Butterfly Beach Sunset


This was from a pretty spectacular sunset back in November that I had a tough time figuring out how to shoot.

Early on, the clouds were exploding with some amazing color, but they were all overhead rather than out over the ocean.

Instead, I spent most of my time focused on the moon, hanging low in the sky (and looking huge, though I've learned this is just an illusion!). There were also some colors to the sky itself that I don't think I've seen before--the sky was actually teal close to the horizon, as you can see here.

I've been trying to work on managing the contrast available in my images. Here, I pushed the highlights to bring out contrast in the clouds and in the reflection of the moon on the water. I kept the rocks in the foreground purposefully pretty dark in hopes of bringing more attention to the reflection from the moon.

Here is the unedited original.

2 comments:

  1. this is a stunning shot....when i looked at the original, it seems to me though that the moon was more pronounced, it's spectacular, perhaps because of the darker contrast there. thanks for sharing!

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  2. Thanks for the feedback! And I think you're right, the moon did get kind of blown out here in comparison to the original. With a little more effort, I imagine I could preserve some of that original definition better. Maybe I'll give it a shot and re-post it--we'll see, so far I have a pretty bad track record of actually acting on good suggestions :).

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