Castaway Point Park, Palm Bay, FL

Today we return to Castaway Point Park in Palm Bay, FL. I probably have mentioned this park is practically across US 1 from my Mother-in-law’s place. I had been looking at the docks as I drove by and finally decided to visit on Easter morning. Other than the early morning sermon and a few fishermen I had the place almost to myself. There are a lot of areas to explore in this little park and I think I managed to get to them all.

This first image is from the end of the dock you can see in the Incoming image below.  I was looking back at the beach area and the second dock.  You can see another view of the dock in this in my original post for Castaway Point.  I really liked the way the lights in the park illuminated the trees from within and the way you can see the lights on the 192 Causeway on the horizon above the dock.

Castaway Point
Olympus OM-D E-M1, M. Zuiko 12-40mm F/2.8, 13s, 22mm, f/8, ISO 800

This second image is from a little beach area that is between the two docks. There was a lot to explore and some really nice photo opportunities. I wanted to try and capture the rocks in this area as they appear to be made up of layers of sand but covered with various life from the river.  Off on the horizon you can see the taller building in Indialantic and Melbourne Beach.

Beach Break
Olympus OM-D E-M1, M. Zuiko 12-40mm F/2.8, 3.2s, 12mm, f/16, ISO 200

I found a small deck over-looking the Turkey Creek inlet and was able to get down to the shore in front of it.  This allowed me to capture some of the water’s motion as it was coming ashore.  Again it is always a balance of how much I want to blur the water versus showing the energy associated with its movement.  Any slower than 1/3 of a second and I lost the sense of movement.  For some images, like my Simplicity image, you might want to completely blur the water and capture an almost surreal look.

Incoming
Olympus OM-D E-M1, M. Zuiko 12-40mm F/2.8, 1/3s, 14mm, f/16, ISO 200

For this last image I wanted to capture the cool erosion patterns the water has cut into the rocks.  It looks like a combination of sand and sediment which has been eaten away by the tides in the river. I also wanted to capture the group of people on the dock to add a little ‘life’ to the image but they kept moving around on me.  LOL

I used three different exposures in creating this image.  Rather than use an HDR program I manually blended the images together using luminosity masks.  I attempted to explain this methodology in my Creating an Image post back in December.  I think the results I was able to achieve on this image turned out better than the one I used to explain the technique.  I realize now that the better the exposures you capture the better the resulting image will be.

Erosion Layers
Olympus OM-D E-M1, M. Zuiko 12-40mm F/2.8, {1/6, 0.5 & 1s bracket}, 14mm, f/8, ISO 200