When You See The Light

June 16, 2014  •  Leave a Comment

Growing up my grandfather had a painting by Euge'ne Boudin on the wall that I could never get enough of (an example of Boudin's work is here: http://www.eugeneboudin.org/The-Touques-at-Saint-Arnoult.html ). The scene below drew such a resemblance to me that I couldn't resist. I am fortunate that my generous aunt has given me that painting that I continue to enjoy immeasurably.

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Gazos Creek Light  On Sunday we went to the San Mateo County coast to take a look at Costanoa Lodge, a lodge, campground and RV park south of Pescadero. The fog was all encompassing most of the day, but in the late afternoon it began to break up. We were headed home, north, when the light in the foothills east of the highway began to come through. Just before crossing the Gazos Creek bridge this view popped up. We turned around in the Gazos Beach parking lot and headed back to find a wide spot to pull over. I walked back back along the road and, fortunately the scene just kept getting better. I really like the impressionistic quality of this magically lit scene. If you want to know how this image was made, read on. Otherwise, I hope you look at it for a bit to enjoy the subtlety of a beautiful moment.

Other photos from the day's trip will hopefully make it into the next post.

Techie Stuff

The image is a stitch of 5 exposures taken on a tripod with a panoramic head. The camera used was a Leica M(240) with the Leica 50mm Summilux ASPH and a polarizing filter. The camera was turned in portrait orientation and rotated for 5 overlapping exposures. Exposure varied from 1/60 to 1/125 and the aperture remained at f/11. Focal point was on the wood sticking out of the water.

Post processing involved loading the 5 images into Adobe Lightroom and processing the raw files slightly. Basically the curve was adjusted to increase exposure, a bit of vibrance and clarity added, and the lens corrections applied. The files were then exported as 16bit tiffs, ProPhoto color space and no compression or resizing at 360dpi.

AutopanoPro ver.3.5 was used to stitch the images together and the result was processed in Adobe Photoshop. A Kolor haze reducing filter and Google NIK plugins (Viveza and ColorEfex Pro) were used to dodge and burn the scene, add some local tonal contrasts, and a bit of softness to the sky and clouds.

In a nutshell, all the techie stuff doesn't matter if the light hadn't been as gorgeous as it was!!


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