Had fun shooting out at Laperuse at sunset today. Still experimenting with painting bracketed shots together instead of just running it into an HDR program. I am not a fan of what Photomatix (an HDR Tone Mapping Program) does to sunset shots by the water. Because of the waves moving, wind blowing on trees, etc, its almost impossible to get away from all the little footprints and ghosting that make it look terrible. Im becoming more and more interested in taking those 3 shots and painting parts of them together as a hybrid simply because it looks better, there are fewer tweaks needed, and it is faster.

I am somewhat happy with this image, I see some flaws in it, but for the most part this is what the human eye would see in this situation, nice shape around the sun, and then looking at the shadows on the rocks, you can still see details. Not something any normal camera can do in a one shot. The shape of the sun came from one image, the sky and island from another, and the water and rocks from a third. Took about 10 minutes to paint together. On the way out the sky turned deep pink for about 10-12 minutes. I did add some contrast to make it more dramatic.