I’ve always edited my photos out of order. It just always made sense. Sometimes I won’t even look at the images from a shoot for days or weeks or even months. I do this so the anticipation of the images builds, and when I finally look at them I have a fresh perspective on them. I also do this so I don’t have to deal with the pressure of editing thousands of images from a trip all at once. It’s just too much of a hassle. I just edited the image below and it was done in January of this year. No biggie! Another advantage is that as I learn new techniques and refine my editing skills, I can edit images that I would have done poorly on earlier. In fact, I tried to edit this very image about a month after January. I failed. I simply could not make the water look right. The exposure that had the good looking waves wasn’t coming through right in Photomatix, and when I tried to mask in the correct one, I just couldn’t make it look good. I tried it again this evening and bam, no problem at all. I have gotten so much better at masking, adjusting exposure levels, re-masking, painting, spotting things to fix, that it was a piece of cake. I can also say with certainty that if I had edited this image in January, the sky would have looked bad. Back then (it seems so long ago) I was still pretty new to HDR, so I simply took the Photomatix result of the sky and went with it. This would cause haloing around trees, and unrealistic colors in the sky.
About the image | Laguna Beach at High Tide
I took this image at a somewhat secluded cove in Laguna Beach, below the famous (and incredibly expensive) Montage Beach Resort. In fact it was so secluded that some photographer felt comfortable enough to photograph his half naked girlfriend and was right in the way of my shots for a while. After they finally left, I was free to create images of the sunset! Kristin and I waited at this cove for an hour or so waiting for the sun to go down, and for naked people to leave. During the sunset, I took tons of images from different angles. And when it just started dipping below the horizon we started to leave to find a vantage point on top of the cliffs. Right when I got the end of the cove we were in, I found this spot and fired off 6 exposures from my 5D Mark II.
Canon EOS 5D Mark II, Canon 15mm Fisheye f/2.8, 15mm, f/14, ISO 200, 1/13th
