Beautiful May Evening

May Sunset on the Ohio River
May Sunset on the Ohio River

Click on the image to enlarge it in another window.

This image is from a photo shoot I did last Thursday evening after shooting at the Pegasus Parade earlier in the afternoon. I wasn’t ready to go home yet so we headed down to Waterfront Park to explore it further and capture some images with Derby Festival goers using the park. We walked around the park for a couple of hours and wound up on my favorite place to shoot Waterfront Park from, the Big Four Bridge. I had been up there the prior afternoon and evening to photograph the Great Steamboat Race but I really wasn’t happy with a lot of the landscapes I shot after the race ended. I wanted to capture the dramatic sky that was visible Thursday so we hung out on the bridge waiting for sunset.

I shot my normal three frame bracket set of -2, 0 and +2 EV for this HDR image. Today I made a change in my processing and started my post processing in NIK Sharpener Pro 3. I allowed the program to determine the amount of RAW pre-sharpening to apply and then I opened the sharpened RAW files in NIK HDR Efex Pro 2. I merged the three frames in NIK HDR Efex Pro 2 and kept the anti-ghosting set at 20%. I then applied the Deep #1 preset which I tweaked slightly to improve contrast and accent the highlights and shadows. Once that was finished I returned the HDR image to Aperture 3 where I spent some time adjusting the individual color channels as well as the vibrance and saturation of each one. Finally I applied my sharpening and a very light vignette to the image.

 

18 thoughts on “Beautiful May Evening

    1. Thank you that is my goal for HDR; it’s a tool that can be used like a sledgehammer or with the restraint of a jeweler’s mallet to produce something memorable.

  1. I just wish I’d been sat next to you. It’s all about being their just at the right time and experiencing such wonders as much as it is capturing such an awesome image. Here in the UK we have had virtually 12 months of grey skies and continuous rain. For me sunsets like this are a rarity. It’s why I’ve considered emigrating. Global warming has made our climate even wetter than before. Can you believe it.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published.

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.