Rolling with the tide

Well, I have pretty much been the worst blogger ever lately.  With vacation, the extended weekend, being busy at work and feeling under the weather for the past few days, I just haven’t really felt up to posting.  New work though, so I am hoping to turn it around.  I spent a good bit of time yesterday catching up on all of my flickr contacts and I plan to do the same with all of your blog posts.  Anyways, on to today’s post.

This is another one from Ocean City on the morning that I wasn’t able to quite capture the sunrise with all of the clouds.  I made it all the way down to the pier at the end of the boardwalk, only to find that it was closed on Sunday morning.  So, instead of getting the end of the pier shot like I wanted, I settled for this one.  The light from the sun was still being diffused a bit by the clouds, however I was able to capture a few sun rays.  The tractors had just finished raking the beach, and a few people had even found their way down to stake out their spot this early.  All in all, I was pretty happy with the view.

On to the processing.  This is a seven exposure HDR processed with Photomatix and then edited in CS5.  After removing all those pesky dust spots from the sky, I added an overall S curve to increase contrast in the entire scene, as well as a blue curves layer for the sky.  I added a Tonal Contrast Filter on the sand from the Color Efex and then a Landscape Enhance and Light Rays effect from onOne PhotoTools to finish it up.

I apologize again for the extended absence.  Back in the saddle today though.

One last thing.  I updated to WordPress 3.2 this morning and it wrecked havoc with my plugins.  Will do have to do a clean install of them in the next few days.