Today’s Bacon | Peter van Allen
by Joe
A simple sunset on the Chesil Beach at Portland, part of the World Heritage Jurassic Coast on the south coast of Dorset, UK.
This pebble beach is one of my favourite places for photography, the beach stretches 18 miles from West Bay nr Bridport in the west to my home on the ‘Isle’ of Portland in the east.
This picture was taken one early evening last week, that evening I had already taken some pictures of the boats and other things that I had seen on the beach. I was mainly using a Nikon D90 and a Sigma 10-20mm wide angle lens (love this lens for landscape images) taking bracketed images, 3 exposures of the same image at -2, 0, +2 exposure values for compositing as HDR images, however because the different exposures are captured over a period of time, any movement in a scene (on this occasion moving water) can interfere with the hdr effect by ghosting the edges of moving objects.
It was getting very dark and the sun was just hitting the horizon, the water was quite calm so I grabbed several sets of bracketed images with the remaining available light, hoping that the slow movement of the water would have little effect when compositing the images in my hdr software (primarily Photomatix or HDR Soft by Artizen).
When I did get home and started to look at the images, I found that because of the low light and fairly long exposures (1/30th for handheld) there was substantial water movement between exposures and I abandoned hope of making any hdr images. Nevertheless I opened one set of exposures as a multi layered image in Photoshop and looked at the possibility of using areas from each exposure to combine as one image using layer masks, the attached picture is the result of this.
For the sky I used the shortest exposure - as this was the brightest area (masking out the sea and foreground), the middle sea area was taken from the normal exposure (masking out the sky, breaking wave and foreground) and the foreground beach and breaking wave was taken from the longest exposure - as this was the darkest area (masking out the sky and middle sea areas).
I was quite surprised to see how well the different exposures combined together and with a little adjustment to curves, colour and contrast, I was very happy with the result.
The image does lack any subject content, but the idea was to create an image of restful peace, I hope you like it.
See more photos by Peter.
Tags: HDR, Nikon, Nikon D90, Sigma 10-20mm
