The Hidden Gem of Cobscook Bay

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Somewhat north of Lubec, Maine, there’s a little-known state park on Cobscook Bay.

We’ve never seen crowds at the park. There are sections where no RVs are allowed, which is heaven for tent campers.  At night, it’s utterly quiet.  In the morning, the sun rises over the bay and can be photographed right from the campsite. With a tidal range of some seventeen feet in the bay, it’s fascinating to watch this area fill and drain every few hours. When the tide is out, loons, seagulls, ducks, herons and other waterfowl feed on the flats. (The tide was about mid-way during this bracket.)

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This image was generated from nine exposures at 1EV intervals, shot using the Promote Control. In post-, I found that one of the more prevalent HDR programs made chaos with the colors, with the best result looking wayyyy to far-fetched for anyone’s liking.  Images like that should be binned immediately, which is exactly what I did. As they say, no two images are the same with these programs.

I merged the nine exposures in Unified Color’s HDR Expose, choosing to save the resulting 32-bit BEF file without further modification. Turning to Photoshop CS4, I brought the BEF file in and used a couple of different layers generated from Unified Color’s 32-Float plug-in, tweaking the brightness and contrast levels in places.  A few saturation and de-saturation adjustment layers were added, and a slight boost of exposure toward the end, and this was the result.

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