Off in the distance

Still on the boardwalk theme, at least for today.  I’ll probably switch it up tomorrow, but this was one of my favorite shots from the weekend and I wanted to share it.

I took this shot from the very far end of the Boardwalk at Ocean City on our last day there, Sunday morning.  Waking up at 5:15 and hoping to catch the sunrise over the ocean, I was a bit disappointed when I saw a layer of clouds blocking the horizon.  Still got some pretty decent shots of the sun breaking through the clouds about a half hour after sunrise, so it wasn’t a total bust of waking up so early on vacation.  After I was content with my brackets from dawn, I trudged the 28 blocks to the end of the boardwalk to go out on the pier.  Well, it was closed since it was a Sunday morning.  I thought, since I had come that far I might as well get some shots anyway, and I’m glad that I did.  The sun was still a bit hidden behind the clouds, but there were so many different colors looking back down the boardwalk that I couldn’t resist the shot.

This is a seven exposure HDR processed with Photomatix and then CS5.  I thought abour masking the guy jogging in the middle of the frame out, but the scene just looked a bit empty without him there.  I had a conversation with a fellow photog recently about whether or not to keep people in scenes.  I generally like to, as I think it brings a human element to the shot.  He was more about having an empty scene, focusing on the actual location.  To each his own I suppose.  Anyways, after not cloning out the jogger but instead masking him in to reduce the motion blur, I removed some dust spots from the sky, added a Tonal Contrast filter to everything but the sky, and added an overall S Curve to increase contrast.  I added a brightness layer to the bottom half of the scene, and a Turbo Boost, Dreamland and Antique filter to the entire shot to give it kind of a vintage look.  I debated about the vintage look for several minutes, even getting my wife to weigh in on her opinion between the vintage and non vintage, and we both settled on this one.

Thanks for stopping by everyone.  See you all tomorrow.