Sunset Benches

Capitol Lake Benches – 17mm, 1/90 @ f/8.0

I was driving home from taking pictures of something much less interesting when I saw the sky over this park.  You can see the Washington State Capitol building in the middle left of the photo.

Capitol Lake Benches – 17mm, 1/60 @ f/8.0

I used Lightroom and NIK Software plugins to process the photos. It aways amazes me how much an image can change, and how many different ways it can be edited.

Just for fun, lets look at a JPEG photo exported from the unedited RAW, so we can see how far this photo came in post processing.

Capitol Lake Benches – no editing

The key thing to note here is that I exposed for the sky and underexposed the foreground.  Shooting with the Canon 6D, you can get a LOT of detail from the shadows.  But you can’t get back detail from blown highlights.

Still, a better way to handle a shot like this, which I’ll have to explore, is using a graduated neutral density filter to darken the sky and make it closer to the brightness of the foreground.  I have a set of cheaper graduated neutral density filters, but they soften the image and introduce a pinkish color cast. So for now, dialing in a little exposure compensation will have to work for me.  Or a multi-exposure HDR.