“Transcending It” — Pescadero, California
This is the first post of this type, but I will be adding a new post for each new image that I add to my galleries, each post will detail a bit about how I made the image, the equipment I used and the post process methods I used to achieve the final product.
I made this image on a cloudy, drizzly day in February. A storm system had just passed through the San Francisco Bay Area the day before so I was hope that the tail end of the system would carry with it some great clouds and dramatic light. I hopped in my car around lunchtime and headed out to the San Mateo County coastline to a spot I’d scouted out a few weeks before. The spot has some really awesome rock structures, which make for some INCREDIBLE leading lines, but unfortunately they point north-westerly direction so they are tough to incorporate into an image during the winter when the sunset is off to the southwest. But, this day it was pretty clear that there wasn’t going to be much of a sunset because of the heavy cloudcover and lines of low fog and drizzle that were moving through the area. I hung out in my car waiting for a break in the grossness and had a 10-15 minute window of nice light and no drizzle during which I recorded this long exposure.
Here’s some technical information about the exposure and the post processing:
Exposure: 30 seconds, f/11, ISO 100
Camera & Lens: Nikon D7000 — Sigma 10-20mm f/4-5.6 EX DC HSM
Filters: Lee Big Stopper 10-stop Neutral Density Filter, Singh-Ray 3-stop Reverse Graduated Neutral Density Filter
Post processing: I shot this image knowing that the final result would be a black and white. I shot the image in RAW format. In adobe camera raw I cleaned the image up to remove a few dust spots, added a little fill light to gain some detail in the shadows. Then I moved the image over to Photoshop CS5 where I did some minor contrast edits of the sky and foreground separately to protect the white levels in the sky while bringing up the foreground shadows a bit more. This got the image ready for black and white conversion which I accomplished using Nik Silver Efex.