Black, White & Sunny | Cape Lookout, NC
I recently took another ferry ride over to the Cape Lookout lighthouse to shoot it against a dramatic sky, but once again my plans were foiled. It seems like there are never clouds in the sky over there. Good for vacationers, but not for me. A few weeks ago conditions were similar, but I was unable to get a single usable shot because of unforeseen debris on my sensor. All sunflares were useless. This time, sensor cleaned, I shot a few brackets against the spotless blue sky. Those of you who are into HDR know that it’s pretty pointless to try to HDR a sky like this, but I was doing it for the flare. In fact, the lighthouse and the rest of the image are a single exposure masked in. It was just ‘ok’ in color, but I found the black and white conversion really brought out the diamond pattern on the lighthouse and drew a lot of attention to the sun rays pointing at it. The plain blue sky was just over powering, and that’s why black and white worked best.
The Shot: 3 exposure HDR merged in Photomatix. Middle exposure sky and lighthouse were masked back in using photoshop. Finishing touches were made using Nik’s Color Efex and black and white conversion was done in Nik Silver Efex Pro.
©2011 Zach Frailey
