| facebook | 500px | ferpectshots |
Enough with the woodland photographs, today lets talk about my bread and butter landscape location—the High deserts of the west coast. And today's shot comes from the Smith Rock State Park in Oregon. This is one location that we have visited on every trip to the beautiful beaver state. The rock formation is just absolutely stunning, and along with that, Smith Rock is a prime spot for spectacular sunset or sunrise shots.
The first time we visited the park was in 2013, and I had just updated my gear from a crop sensor D7000 to full-frame D800 along with a brand new 24-70 f2.8, and I was hoping for the image quality to take a jump. The expected increase in image quality did not happen. I had to discard a lot of the images because the 36 megapixels of the D800 demanded better technique than the 16 MP D7000. The 24-70 f2.8 was heavy, and the depth of field was shallower. This made sharp frames a challenge. So all in all, not a great first outing.
But I was ready when we returned the second time. I had time to get familiar with my camera gear, and my technique had improved quite a lot. I got way more keepers on this trip, but there we still a lot of photographs that I had to discard. Then I attended some post-processing & workflow classes and understood the importance of having a good workflow and sound post-processing. Now that I have some time on my hands, I revisited some of my old shots. By far, this has been the best skillset I have added as a photographer. Today's image was a stitched panorama of about five images taken in portrait orientation. The first time I post-processed the picture, it looked way too saturated and artificial that I decided not to post it anywhere. But I liked the composition too much and decided to re-process the image. I am much happier with the result. It is way closer to the actual sunrise we encountered that beautiful summer morning. I hope you all enjoy it as well.