Lake Panorama's Marina under Autumn Color

With the south shore of Lake Panorama covered in trees that turned into bright reds, oranges and yellows, I stopped a couple of different mornings to capture the beautiful scene. Arriving in the morning allowed the morning sun to shine on the south shore and kept the water undisturbed by boat traffic.

 The lenses used on this collection of images were the 24-120mm and 70-300mm on the D90. When using a tripod, I turned the VR off on the lense. With an aperture of f8-11 the ISO ranged from 200-400. However, I decided to change up the scene and needed a long exposure to get the water to become soft and smooth. To do this, I jacked up the aperture to f29-36 and changed the ISO to 1 EV under 200. I took the images from different locations around the marina to get different views of the lighthouse, main basin and south shore.

 

The RAW files were put onto my laptop and transferred into ViewNX to start post processing. The white balance was set to either direct sunlight or cloudy and the picture control to Nature-Landscape. The highlight/shadow sliders were also adjusted when needed. To create HDR images, I adjusted the exposure compensation and made 5 different exposed images. Once in EasyHDR, I merged all 5 TIFF files into one using the program. I used either Default or Natural2 settings on the programs default curves.

 

Final post processing was done in PSE 11 with the normal adjustments I’ve been doing in the past. First the clone or healing brush tool was used to get rid of unwanted objects. Next came the step of straightening and cropping the image. I also took the long exposed images of the water and merged them into different images using layer masks so the south shore and lighthouse would be sharp while the water would be soft and smooth.  The final step was to sharpen the images with the high pass filter.

The leaves have quickly blown away but while they lasted, it was a beautiful site on Lake Panorama. Those leaves will soon be replaced with frosty trees, frozen water and snow. I’ll be out capturing those beautiful scenes as well.

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