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Seaweed Salad by Rob Hanson on 500px

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When the weather is yucky and overcast, with no subjects of real interest in sight, it’s time to get on the hands and knees and scramble over the rocks.

Down near Ship Harbor and Wonderland on the “quiet side” of Mt. Desert Island, expansive slabs of rock extend into the ocean. Shallow pools filled with life are created from the receding tide, and as long as one is careful with their footing, you can get up close and personal with all manner of little critters and plants. I found this particular collection of denizens to be a lovely composition, but it also looked quite delicious. (I didn’t do it.)
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A Typical Maine Scene by Rob Hanson on 500px

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There’s no place for photography quite like Maine, particularly Mt. Desert Island and Acadia National Park. There are quite a few people in the area — tourists mostly — and any number of areas that might be considered a bit bland, but around almost every bend, you might be greeted with a scene such as this one.

Typical. Typical, and incredibly beautiful.

If only there was a way to capture the sense of salt air; the sound of seagulls squabbling over a found mollusk; the hearty, clean scent of low tide.

Just a bit north of Bass Harbor, we drove past this area before turning around for the shot. For me, it seems to capture the essence of Maine, with the expansive skies, the scenic beauty, and those wonderful boats that conspire to bring me yet another lobster at the end of the day.
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Big Back Yard

With sunrises like this, it’s hard to leave the place. This was taken one morning at Cobscook Bay State Park in northern Maine, not far from Lubec.

Our tent is just a few feet behind this point of view, making morning shooting very convenient. We often joke about our new campsites having a much bigger back yard than we have at home, and we find no greater pleasure than to just sit and watch nature do its thing, or to capture it in the process.

On a side note, I often think twice about posting in portrait orientation due to the limits of today’s monitors, but in this case, I think it suits the subject well, although I may next try a vertical panorama.

Click on the image to see it larger in a new window in the Waterscapes Gallery.

Once again, this image was composited in Photoshop by layering outputs from seven brackets in Photomatix Pro 4, HDR Expose/32-Float, and HDR Efex Pro. Each had something interesting and unique to offer to the final image, and none really created what I wanted in and of itself. Beyond that layering and masking, there was very little done in the way of color or saturation. In fact, I knocked back the saturation a bit using Topaz Adjust ‘Neutralizer’. In the end, this image represents what I saw that morning, but sometimes you have to coax it out of the brackets.