Photo by Kurt A. Moore-Moore Images Photographic Services
Westfield New York
Last night I went to Barcelona Harbor on Lake Erie in Westfield N.Y. Barcelona Harbor and Lighthouse is one of the many jewels on Lake Erie in Chautauqua County New York. The small harbor and lighthouse is a frequent subject of mine because I live about 1.5 miles away and the sunset can be incredible. But this night there wasn’t much of a sunset so I played around a little. I set the exposure of the camera at -2 1/2 stops from what the cameras meter was suggesting as a proper exposure. Also since I was doing a panorama of the scene I had to consider the lower light levels as I rotated the camera around the scene and away from the sun. With the exposure set I rotated the camera around the scene taking a total of 6 images. Once back a the computer I opened the images in Adobe bridge and then loaded them into photomerge in photoshop and then I let photoshop preform it’s magic. After photoshop did it’s thing I went into the image and cleaned up some of the areas were the multiple images came together. With the image prepared I saved the images as a master file and them flattened a version of it to make some additional changes, with the image flattened I duplicated it onto another layer and then added a levels adjustment mask to this layer and used the levels to lighten the image to get some foreground detail. With the lighter image I added an adjustment mask so that I could paint back in the darker image in the layer below it. Most of the painting was done in the sky area to bring back the better exposure on the original image while leaving the detail in the foreground. I also removed some electrical power lines from the upper left corner of the image.
For not being a very good sunset I think the underexposure and the photoshop tonal control ended up making a nice image.
Camera
Canon 7D with 18-50mm sigma lens
Tripod with cable release
Lens set at about 21mm
Exposure set at ISO 400, F22 @ 1/80 sec
Final image size:
150 megs
71″wide x 12.5″high
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