Beautiful summer nights at Little Corona Del Mar beach. This was the very last shot of the evening. I was packing up my gear and getting read to leave when my wife said, turn around. Aren’t you going to capture that?
I knew I didn’t want to do a wide angle shot this time. I first tried using my 85mm prime but that was zoomed in too much, so I swapped on my 50mm prime. That gave me exactly the perspective I was looking to capture. I typically use my Lee graduated neutral density filters for my wide angle lens but I just recently picked up a 58mm adapter ring so that I can begin using them on my 50mm and 85mm lenses as well. This photograph is a single exposure, captured with a .9 and a .6 Lee graduated neutral density filter stacked together.
After bringing the photo into Lightroom, I applied minor color adjustments to bring out the colors according to how I saw them. When shooting in raw, all color adjustments and profiles are stripped from the raw file so that you can apply your own adjustments in post processing. When you see the preview of the photo on the back of your Camera’s LCD, that is a Jpeg preview with color profiles applied in camera. That is why your raw photos always look less vibrant than the preview you saw in your camera. After adjusting the colors, I pulled the photo into Nik Color Efex and applied a very minor detail extractor filter on the water and cleaned up some of the noise using Noiseware 5
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