Another Sunset and a First!

I made a return visit to Birch Bay State Park the other day because it's such a nice place to see a sunset. As it was a Friday night, the beach was rather busy, but people were generally quite friendly, and the beach was certainly big enough to accommodate both other beachgoers and my own search for vantage points. The largest distraction was probably the hunger-inducing smells of people's picnics.

First is a view of the sunset through a big ol' piece of driftwood. I had to break out the heavy artillery for this one and use my ultra-wide lens. I used f/22 because I wanted to produce the sun rays you see here, as well as maximizing my area of focus. It's already edited - the contrast on this shot was quite high, and wasn't presentable in the camera's JPEG form. Editing from the RAW file, I was able to recover some of the shadows without blowing out the sunset itself.

Next is a view of the sunset itself. It's a bit more generic, but I still like it, and like the slight water blur I got at 1/13 of a second. Again, the sun rays you see are due to a narrow aperture, f/25.

Lastly, my first-ever wildlife photograph: a bald eagle that some kind beachgoers pointed out to me! I would have liked to zoom up closer, but my lens only goes up to 200mm - I haven't invested in anything more because I typically don't do wildlife! Who knows, though. I was lucky in this shot because the eagle stood quite still, basically posing for me. Anyway, if you want to see some real bird photography, explore the work of my friend Tyler Hartje. But here's my picture: