Larrabee, Take Two!

I'm going to start with a second attempt at an image that I tried a few weeks ago; it was unsatisfactory because the rocks were too dark and the sunset was too bright. I crawled over the rocks - it was somehow more difficult than I remembered - to get practically the same angle. I did two things to make the lighting more even: The first was using my flash, armed with fresh batteries, to light up the otherwise too-dark rock face. Thanks to my angle and the positioning of the rocks, the flash didn't produce any weird shadows or glares. The second was shooting right at the moment that the sun was almost completely down; having only a tiny portion of the sun still over the horizon enabled me to bump the exposure up a bit. Although it's hard to tell just on Blogger, there is a lot more detail in the shadows, and color in the highlights, than in my last attempt.

Next come a couple more experimental shots. These are of ocean spray, with the sunlit waters of Puget Sound in the background. The bright color of ocean spray actually didn't hold up very well against the brightness of the sunlit waters, but that's okay. I'm not sure if I like them, but they're different, and have a warm, summery feel. For the first, I used f/9, to keep some detail in the background waves. For the second, I used f/8 - and the bokeh were still circular, basically! And I had some expansion of detail in the foreground.