Deciding what to shoot and where to shoot is always the first thing to do when I’m shooting landscape. Yesterday I decided to shoot the sunset at Garden City Pier. Even with all the pier photos that I shot, this was only my second time shooting at Garden City. Most of my pier shots are Surfside Pier which is a few miles up the road. Garden City is a bigger pier but less parking and in the summer, its really hard to find good parking. This time of year you get your choice of spaces. I normally shoot sunrise photos at piers since the sun rises over the ocean. It should be noted that I haven’t shot sunrise shots at Garden City. My other shots were about 20 minutes before a severe storm a few weeks ago during mid day.
I would say the main reason I decided to shoot Garden City instead of Surfside was as I was getting ready to leave, I was talking to my mother. When I told her that I was heading out to shoot the sunset, her response was "you are not planning on shooting the pier again, are you?" Okay then, change of plans. Granted I still shot a pier. I got in my car and decided to shoot Garden City Pier since I had only shot it once before. Taking my trusty Nikon D90 camera along with my 24-70mm and 70-300mm lenses, knowing full well that I would probably only shoot with my new lens. The newness of the lens hasn’t worn off yet and really don’t need a longer zoom lens when shooting the pier since I parked near it.
Just like most of my more recent shoots, this one was HDR photography as well. For those who don’t know what HDR Photography is, HDR stands for High Dynamic Range. Its usually 3 or more images. As per wikipedia, "In photography, dynamic range is measure in EV differences (known as stops) between the brightest and the darkest part of the image that show detail. An increase of one EV or one stop in doubling of the amount of line. High-dynamic-range photographs are generally achieved by capturing multiple stand photographs, often using exposure bracketing, and then merging them into HDR image." This is exactly what I did. Setting my camera up on a tripod because the images have to be the exact same image. My camera was set to bracket so that one photo was at normal exposure, one was one stop lower and the other was one stop higher. I’ll get to what to do with the images in my Editing the Images post.
The one complaint I have of shooting on the beach is the amount sound you get into your shoes and all over your stuff.
The next blog post will be Shooting the Images and should be out in the next couple days.