This is another one from Fort Myers Beach when I was back in America. The title kinda speaks for itself in this one.
Did a mild HDR edit and called it a day. Spent more time removing dust spots than anything else.
Shot on a Sony A7ii.
Enjoy.
Tag: Fort Myers Florida
This is underneath the pier at Fort Myers Beach in Florida. Guess that’s why I called it Under The Pier And Dreaming. I’m original like that.
This was done in HDR using Aurora 2019. One image and done. I haven’t shot bracketed images in about forever when you can do HDR with one anymore. The program does a good job with just one image so why bother.
Enjoy
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Sunset Over The Pier
This is the fishing pier at Fort Myer’s beach. Shockingly enough this was my first trip ever to Fort Myer’s beach so I really had no idea that the pier even existed.
I set up my trip in the water as I took this photo. Some guy was behind me going what you shoot? I was like the sunset over the pier. He goes brilliant and busts out his cell phone for the same shot. He ended up following me and getting the same shots I was getting for about 15 minutes.
I did this one in subtle HDR. I didn’t see a need to go nuts about it. Plus I prefer the subtle versus the so damn obvious versus of HDR.
Anyways. Enjoy.
This was taken at Six Mile Cypress Slough Preserve when I went through there. There are a few areas where they have set up viewing platforms so I figured I might as well use them.
I wanted to incorporate the lily pads and get the reflections in the image as well. I luckily took several images because the first image I worked on turned out not to be in focus. Good thing you can just copy settings in Lightroom and be done with it. Once I took it into Photoshop did some dodging and burning to bring out the reflection and add density to the trees.
Figured why not play some more and took it into ColorEfx and added a few more tweaks here and there. Final bit was just cleaning up the dust spots and then sharpening. Professional hint, sharpen then clean else you may get some weird artifacts.
Enjoy.
This set of images is really all about light for the most part. However, they were all shot around my Mom’s house in Fort Myers, Florida. I really never left her front or back yards. Well, one shot was technically on the neighbors but he doesn’t have a fence so it counts! Plus you can see my Mom’s fence so clearly it was around the yard.
These images were shot on 2 cameras. The Sony A7ii using a 16-25mm 4.0 and a Canon 55mm 1.2 that just showed up in the mail while I was in Fort Myers. The other camera a Sony RX100iii. The images were shot over different days.
Enjoy
I have published the landscape version of this photo before. I figured why not publish the portrait version. You get a whole different perspective of the image.
The image shifts all over the place color wise. You go from the black water to the bright bridge light reflecting off it. Then you have the bridge itself and the buildings in the distant. They all twinkle like stars at night. However, there are real stars visible. That isn’t noise in the sky, those are real planets or stars. Rare that I would have captured that with so much ambient light bleeding into the night sky but I got lucky I guess.
This is a straight up standard edit. Nothing fancy going on. No masking or layers to enhance the photo. I just put the contrast in via a curves adjustment then some local dodging and burning. I did desaturate the water where the lights reflected. It was a bit too much. Hit save and done.
Enjoy
Since I was playing in the archives I came across some night shots I never published. This would be one of them from when I was in Fort Myers, Florida. Which I will be heading to in about 30 days.
This is is the magical blue hour that photographers talk about. While it may look like a product of rain or a storm the reality is that is just the clouds coming in from the Gulf of Mexico and with it the evening breeze in Fort Myers.
I liked this photo because of the cool clouds in the sky and the streak of light from a boat coming down/up (hell if I know) the Caloosahatchee River. It made for an interesting photos so I went ahead and just edited it.
Speaking of editing I didn’t mask anything in. I just hit my camera defaults and then went about through and made my usual Lightroom adjustments. Into Photoshop and the usual curves adjustment. I then just went through and did some local dodging and burning for local contrast. Quick sharpen and done.
Enjoy.
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Rising Cloud
This is a shot from Fort Myers, Florida I took a few years ago. It was apart of the everything must be in HDR phase when I had no clue what I was really doing.
Fort Myers has to have some of the weirdest skies I have seen. Well, at least paid attention to since I started photography. It’s on the Gulf of Mexico so you get all the winds coming in from the gulf along with the humidity which makes the clouds go all weird. So you get some cool clouds to go with the sky color if that is your thing.
This image got the nod when I was just going through and seeing what I ignored before. It was the cloud obviously that drew my attention. I had shot a 7 exposure set for the imagined HDR photo but I likely tossed it because the resulting image was a mess. Honestly, if you want to do HDR just stick with 3 frames with a 2 stop bracket and be done. Anything more and you introduce a whole host of problems.
Editing this I used the base exposure for the image. Applied my camera profile and then went about doing the base adjustments in Lightroom. For picking white balance you can’t go wrong with sunny or cloudy. While I could have likely white balanced off the cloud I found that those two give the best overall average for a sky.
Once that was done into Photoshop as usual to apply my curves adjustment to correct exposure and add contrast. Then it was just local adjustments doing dodge and burn.
Enjoy.
Shot from the Route 41 bridge in Fort Myers, Florida. No idea what the real bridge name is but I do know the road name so going with that.
This was shot a couple years ago. It was meant to be HDR when I was just learning about it. So I had 7 images to stack which would have introduced so much noise that it wasn’t worth the effort. The image being published is just a single image. It’s amazing what you can learn in a few years.
I mentioned yesterday why I keep going back to my archives. It’s nice to look at an image you passed on to see what you can do with it. Knowing full well I can do way more in Photoshop than I ever did before I could edit this image. Plus, I’m a sucker for a good looking sunset image. Low hanging fruit of the photographic world. Ranks up there with animal photos.
The one thing I do with every image now is load my camera defaults. I have camera profiles for all my images. This helps me work off a consistent base image knowing that the color and distortion has been corrected for me already. This means I can quickly set the white balance and move on. For sunsets you want daylight or cloudy. It will be correct 98% of the time for a white balance.
When I got to Photoshop I knew this was going to be low key image. So I made my curves adjustment until the sun became the focus of the image. Then I just dodged and burned the various bits of the bridge to get it to where I wanted it.
The image felt it was missing something so I loaded up Intensify CK. Found a preset I was happy with, mainly focused on the water and then brought that into Photoshop. Masked that bit in and called it a day.
Enjoy.
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Distant Sunset
I return to Florida even though I’m in Thailand at the moment for this image. I am amazed at how many images I got out of this one area just by changing the angle and moving around a bit. They are similar but always different.
Editing wise I did the usual routine then started to mask in bits. I wanted the sky and the dock/pier thing to pop but leave the water soft. It was too distracting so masked in a bit off of Intensify CK. I always add hue/saturation to my images like this and took it into Color Efex for a bump then did some color correction and a bit more contrast with Pro Contrast which is rather a brilliant tool. I don’t mask that bit in as it usually works for the whole image. Then into Noiseless Pro to remove the sky noise and done.
It always sounds like a lot of work but the biggest pain in waiting for the various tools to look the image which can be huge once you start masking stuff.
Enjoy!
