Missouri River Cruise
K10D & DA15mm 1/180s @ f/8 iso400 w/ flash
My friend Mike was gracious enough to get up before sunrise for a photo shoot from his boat on the Missouri River his morning. Although we didn’t see much wildlife, it was a beautiful morning to be on the river. The air temperature was cold so the day started off with some fog over the water but it dissipated shortly after sunrise.
I worked the image below pretty hard in post-processing. It was captured with a Pentax K7 dslr with Pentax smc FA43mm at 1/250s at f/8 iso200. To deal with the dynamic range of this shot, I started by processing two versions of the RAW image; one with the exposure adjusted extremely dark to maintain some detail in the sky and star burst at the sun. The second one was adjusted with a better exposure for the trees, fog, and water. I layered the darker image on top of the lighter one and used a layer mask to selectively reveal some of the lighter areas from the first image.
After the two images were combined I used curves to increase contrast, applied shadow/highlight adjustment to the trees, and finally, pushed saturation with NIK Viveza 2 (plug-in for Photoshop). I saved it for the web by resizing to 72 dpi, sharpened the trees and river bank with NIK sharpener, and changed the color space from aRGB to sRGB. Comments welcome.
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K7 w/ FA43mm - 1/250s at f/8 iso200
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Date: May 15, 2010
Categories: Landscapes