This HDR shot was taken at Goose Creek State Park in Eastern North Carolina. I decided to take a day trip at the Inner Banks and explore “Little” Washington. After a few hours, we took a drive toward the coast and stumbled across this small state park located just across the water from Blounts Bay and close to the town of Bath.

This shot was taken from one of the parking lots were many of the hiking trails start. I also visited the beach and will be presenting some of those shots later.

This one was taken in late afternoon with long deep shadows. I positioned myself so that the shadows would fall away from my view point with the light falling directly on the trees. I know, it’s not the typical method but I sometimes like the challenge of an unorthodox approach.

Five shots were loaded into Nik HDR Efex Pro for tone mapping where I worked with Control Points to add varying amounts of contrast, structure and selective vignetting. But, most of my work was in Adobe Photoshop where I applied changes using Hue/Saturation to get the colors just the way that I remembered.

My current wide angle zoom lens tends to give very sharp images but also distorts the color just a bit. What you see here is pretty close to reality. Those reddish pine needles, grey trunks, still green needles and touch of blue sky give a beautifully realistic color pallet of tonality. Kind of poetic, huh?

My final step was to add sharpness using Filter > Sharpen > Unsharp Mask set to Amount = 200%, Radius = .5 pixels and Threshold = 0.  I then used File > Fade Unsharp Mask with Mode = Luminosity and set Opacity = 45%. This gave me the perfect amount of sharpening.

For tomorrow, we go to the beach!