The Pacific Northwest weather has been conspiring against my attempts to see the PANSTARRS comet that is visible in the evening sky at the moment, with rather too many days of complete cloud cover.
Finally, we had a nice day, and although it wasn't totally clear, I headed off to a good location for seeing the western sky, as well as somewhere I haven't been before, Garry Point Park in Richmond, near Steveston Village.
Sadly the clouds on the horizon had swept over at dusk and blocked out any chance of seeing the comet, but before that happened I did manage to take a few shots of the beautiful sunset.
A large number of logs are transported down the Fraser River from forests higher up, and some of these escape and are washed ashore. I'm not sure if that's the case with this tree stump, as it's absolutely huge, but it made for an interesting composition.
This shot had a lot of dynamic range. I used a 3-stop graduated ND filter to darken the sky, and then took three shots bracketed in 2-stop intervals and used HDR to process these and bring out some detail in the foreground.
I'm a British software developer and photographer living in Vancouver, BC. I mainly photograph landscapes, cityscapes, night scenes, and water.
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@brav Thanks! For this shot I processed the whole image as HDR, but the HDR effect is relatively minor -- a lot of the hard work is being done by the graduated filter.
@markyl Thank you! I have played with the in-camera HDR, but I've never used it on a shot I've posted. It seems to do a pretty decent job, but I prefer the control of being able to tweak the parameters and get the exact result I'm looking for.
@abirkill thanks, i've just got the camera, not that i've used it yet as finding it a little daunting compared to my 7D, just wondered... I assume its something like PhotomatixPro?
@markyl The menu system is quite impressive compared to older Canon cameras, isn't it! Yes, I use Photomatix for most of my HDR shots (although I tend to avoid HDR where possible)
@markyl Thank you! I have played with the in-camera HDR, but I've never used it on a shot I've posted. It seems to do a pretty decent job, but I prefer the control of being able to tweak the parameters and get the exact result I'm looking for.