Mar-2015
Antigua! Shirley Heights at Sunset
Shirley Heights – Antigua
This last week I spent some time on the beautiful island of Antigua! While this was more of a true vacation than a photography trip- I still brought along the D800 just in case there was some good shooting to do. On the final evening we went up to Shirley Heights- a hilltop overlooking the historic English Harbor (with a nice sunset behind it!). After looking at a few shooting locations I set up for sunset and got this nice shot right after the lights came on and the sun went down.
The above shot was taken using a few shots of a 5 stop bracket. I combined the -2, 0 and +1 exposures manually with luminosity masks to make the final product. I did some minor local brightness corrections and sharpened using lume masks and the high pass filter.
Below is a before and after of a panoramic taken a few minutes later. This is only one shot deep (no combinations and masking) and 5 shots wide, for a total of 62 MP after overlaps! When shooting a panoramic, it’s key to manually fix the exposure settings to the average, so it does not change from frame to frame. This makes blending a lot easier, but also causes you to loose some of each shot’s range. You can see below that in addition to adding back some of what was lost via post-processing… I also took a little artistic liberty with the sunset 🙂
[baslider name=”AntiguaPano”]