A Few from Monterey, CA

hawkeye978

I had to go to Monterey for a conference at the last minute last week as a stand in. I finally was able to figure out how to take along my tripod and so had a real opportunity to shoot while I was there. I was there only part of Monday and Tuesday before leaving on Wednesday but managed to shoot about 450 frames. I'm still processing but here are a few.

I'm still considering these work in progress. I'm working on new techniques so I'm not sure if I've got it quite right. C&C welcome and encouraged.

#1 Sunrise along Ocean View Boulevard

It was raining on Tuesday morning when I got up about 5:30a. I decided to go out anyway and fortunately the rain stopped and the sun broke through just as it was rising so I got some decent light.



#2 Sunrise over the Rocks



#3 Point Lobos at Sunset

This is at the Point Lobos State Reserve just outside of Carmel.



Everything in this set is HDR but most of the processing is occurring in Photoshop. I'm preparing the three files in Photomatix with just enough tone mapping to get the details I want. Then I go into Photoshop and generate various masks for curve adjustments.

Thanks for looking. Other pictures will be posted in the gallery here.

Alpha_Plus

Brilliant shots Tom! I think the first one is my favourite - I love the colour

Ifocus4u

Your series is stunning. The HDR is perfect in my eyes. Lovely series and thanks for sharing!

schmoo

Awesome timing with the weather. And Point Lobos is someplace I'm dying to visit, but they don't allow dogs (understandably) so we haven't been in yet. Gorgeous!

ront

IMHO, I see no way that these could be improved!! They are incredible!!

Ron

squirl033

i really like the point lobos shot, but i think it'd look a bit better with a little more sky...

pillman

No 2 my favorite.. HDR ?

kdog

It really pays to get out there regardless of what they weather's doing, eh?

And whatever your doing for your processing looks great. My only comment, is that I would reduce the brightness of the rocks in the lower left on the first one. It's a bit unnaturally bright. The foreground may be a bit bright in the last one as well. But that may be a personal choice thing.

Cheers,
-joel

hawkeye978

Thank you all for the comments.

Bill, yes #2 is HDR. I processed them all with HDR to see what I could get.

Joel, thanks for the comments. I'm still looking at the processing and part of what I'm looking at is adjusting the saturation and brightness that comes out of the processing.