Another two-shot handheld HDR, this time with different manual shutter speed and ISO settings as the light was rapidly changing, manually aligned and merged to get the most drama from the sky and the lighting on the land and sea. The images chosen for the HDR were from a consecutive series, rapidly shot, which captured the moment the streetlights were turning on - the higher exposed image which was exposed for the shore was taken the moment before they lit.
Shot from the same location as "Sun, Sky, Sea, Ships, Shore and Shade", this is in a way a spiritual successor to that image:
However, the edit is intended to be more subtle, with a softer and more mellow, pastel colour palette. Normally I'm a proponent of lower resolution images, but there's a great deal of detail in the shore buildings and boats which I find myself wishing was visible here - at 1200x800, however, you just can't make any of it out. The lens distortion also has the buildings leaning in a little too much, so not seeing much detail there is probably for the best.
Overall editing steps consisted of manual HDR combination, separate curves selectively applied to the sky and the land and sea, cloning out sensor dust and distracting floats in the foreground, wavelet decompose and suppression of coarse details in the lower clouds and sea, and suppression of finer details and noise in the upper clouds. Finally resize, wavelet decompose at the new size and raising the finest detail level's influence globally, and finally selective sharpen.
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Place: 25 out of 81 Avg (all users): 5.7813 Avg (commenters): 5.5000 Avg (participants): 5.7907 Avg (non-participants): 5.7619 Views since voting: 495 Views during voting: 182 Votes: 64 Comments: 3 Favorites: 0
An interesting image that contributes to the challenge
A lovely soothing tranquil scene. You have identified some of the problems as has one of your commenters too so yes you’re right its probably better not to have too much resolution here. What I’m most troubled with is the sloping sea! There is a definite lean to the left which is not helped by the right shoreline which feels as though its pushing the whole image. In terms of the challenge theme it would work better if there were specific conditions being portrayed, a look at the front page will perhaps convey my meaning better. As always Eugene, an interesting image but it doesn’t quite work as well as it could.
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