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Just another sunset from our campsite in Maine, autumn of 2012.

I understand that we should ‘shoot where we live’ – and there are plenty of opportunities to do so – but the Great State of Maine, with its natural beauty, presents a target-rich environment for beautiful shots. Sometimes, you don’t even have to wander out of your campsite, as was the case here. We were just sittin’ around chilling as the sun went down, and the sky lit up as you see here. While snapping the shutter furiously, I had to remind myself to soak it in.

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Merged in Photomatix Pro to 32-bit TIFF, pre-processed without tonemapping in ACR, finished in Photoshop CS6 with Nik Color Efex Pro filters.

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In the recent HDR Collaboration project, Inland Sailor, I mentioned that prior to snapping those brackets we had indulged in a great lobster dinner. This scene is from Thurston’s Lobster Pound in Bernard, Maine, where lobster boats unload their daily catch to be enjoyed at the waterfront restaurant. It’s a great place to kick back and enjoy the scenery while waiting for your crustaceans to steam.

To be honest, I’ve become a bit bored with standard processing techniques, even though there is always room for improvement (perhaps particularly so in my case.) I’m sure it’s just a temporary condition. However, in order to fully break away from my typical stuff, I decided to give the image more of a nostalgic, postcard feel using a few techniques that I don’t usually approach. Given that the composition of the original shot was cluttered and had a chaos of different colors, I like the way that this treatment works with the scene, and hope you like it, too.

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Starting with an tonemapped image from 7 exposures (+/-1EV, f/14, 75mm, ISO200), I applied a Shadowmap derived from Nik’s Silver Efex Pro, adjusted for some imperfections, then turned around in SEP to apply both aged toning and light vignette effects. Seeing that it was a bit too monochromatic, I allowed just a hint of color to sneak through in places. Various other more subtle plug-ins were used, including Topaz DeNoise and Nik’s Color Efex Pro 4 for final dressing.

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Bass Harbor Head Lighthouse - © 2011 Rob Hanson Photography

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On the southwest side of Mount Desert Island, far from the tourist-laden areas of Bar Harbor and Acadia National Park, is the easily accessible Bass Harbor Head Lighthouse.

Since it’s just a short walk from the parking lot down to the rocks, it’s probably one of the most frequently photographed lighthouses in Maine. I can safely suggest that on this evening, at least 100 pictures were taken, judging by the small crowd that crammed into nooks and crannies on the craggy rocks. As the sun began to set, more and more people filtered down the steep steps, looking for a place to shoot the lighthouse while simultaneously avoiding having other people in the frame. Not an easy thing to do…

I rather quickly tired of maneuvering with the crowd down below and decided to move up the hill a bit for a different perspective. I had my heavy boots on, so it was pretty easy to scramble over the rough rocks and set the tripod in a safe place to catch the sun behind the pine tree. Even that didn’t stop one intrepid couple from hiking directly into my frame, causing me to throw out one of the exposures.

It’s a jungle out there, but the rewards are great.

Since so many images have been taken of this lighthouse, I wanted my version to be as distinctive as possible, so I pushed the ‘painterly’ feel in processing rather than keeping it hyper-realistic. For this scene, I like how it worked out.

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HDR from eleven exposures +/-1EV, f/22, 31mm, processed with HDR Express, Photomatix Pro, Nik Color Efex Pro 4, Photoshop CS5

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Hammonassetsunset

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It seemed an appropriate way to close out the week by posting a nice sunset image to go along with yesterday’s “Early One Morning” sunrise.  This also marks my fifth post out of five days, which is likely a record for me.

This was taken while staying at Hammonasset Beach State Park in Connecticut, the evening we landed at the campsite. We had been driving all day long, so strolling around to enjoy the quiet and serenity was just what we needed. We fancied that the fisherman came out of the large house on the right to catch his dinner on the jetty.

Six exposure HDR, f/7.1, 11mm, ISO 200. Merged in HDR Express, adjusted using 32 Float in Photoshop CS5, with Nik Color Efex Pro and Topaz DeNoise. This one seemed a real bear to process. Finding the right balance between foreground and background — so that neither looked out of place — was fairly challenging.

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One of the great things about living in this part of North Carolina is that we’re surrounded by water. Not that it’s all deep water, mind you, but the area around Cape Lookout and the Pamlico Sound is ripe with opportunities for world-class kayaking trips.

Yesterday was a brilliantly clear and warm day for late October, so we took advantage of the opportunity to paddle out to Cape Lookout and Shackleford Banks. We paddled amongst large pods of dolphins; Loggerhead turtles visited the boats; a small island was chock full of pelicans; a family of wild ponies gave us a great photo op (and we’re still working on the model releases.) It just doesn’t get any better than this kind of day.

Here, late in the day, we encountered a sand flat that grounded the boats, so we walked part of the way home. It was okay… we were in no hurry to return.

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Processing notes:

This was taken from a single RAW image. After making some minor adjustments in Adobe Camera Raw, I brought it into Photoshop and immediately turned it over to 32 Float, from Unified Color. A few adjustments there brought it to most of what you see here. Several filters from NIK Color Efex Pro were used to jazz things up, including Polarization, Brilliance/Warmth, Gradient, and Darken/Lighten Center. A pass with Imagenomics Noiseware Pro and two sharpening passes using the LAHR/HALR technique (Tutorial), and done.  No cropping was applied; I thought the framing was just about perfect right out of the camera.
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To see this image much larger, click on the image to see it in a new window on the Waterscapes Gallery.

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

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When on an extended camping trip, one’s next move is usually determined by the weather. In this case in northern Maine, with no internet access or NOAA weather radio reception, we weren’t sure whether or not to stay another day.

The sunset told us to stick around a while… which we did.

This was taken during a superior sunset from Dunn Point at Lily Bay State Park, on Moosehead Lake, northern Maine. During that time, we were visited by ducks, beavers, loons, and one very curious red fox.

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For this image, I combined outputs from two different HDR processing programs, HDR Efex Pro from NIK Software, and Photomatix Pro 4. HDR Efex Pro did some wonderful things for the water and mountains, but Photomatix Pro brought out the drama in the sky.  Using these two outputs, along with the shadowmapping process (see tutorial section), I created a decent composite. A few adjustments were made to desat the sky, smooth out the water a bit, and Topaz Detail and Topaz Adjust were used to bring out some of the finely structured, subtle details here and there.

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… on Blueberry Hill, on the auto road to the summit of Cadillac Mountain, in Acadia National Park, Maine.

You can click on the picture for a lager view in my Landscapes Gallery.

As friend Bob Lussier might suggest, it’s “just another Acadia sunset.” Ay-yuh…

While Acadia National Park is one of the most beautiful places we know of, it’s also the second most heavily visited national park in the country. For those looking for tourist attractions and shopping, or to get rinsed off a rock in high surf, there’s no shortage of opportunity. But if you’d prefer solitude, you can find niches and other isolated spots where you’re just not aware of another person on the planet.

Blueberry Hill, however, is not one of those places of solitude. While we really wanted to get a good Cadillac Mountain sunset shot, so did 50 other people gathered at the spot. It was worth it for the view, and I met another nice photographer during the shoot.

This image is an HDR derived from nine frames, taken using the Promote Control. Those nine frames were processed in Photomatix Pro 4 using the Shadowmapping technique found in this blog, with a little help from Topaz Adjust.  I found that very little needed to be done, though, as the scene spoke for itself.