Delta Lake State Park

Yesterday was a short work day.  My company offers summer hours which allows us to work four, nine hour days and then only have to work four hours on Friday.  With this being a long weekend, and it was a very long week for me in which I had unintentionally worked nine-plus hours all week, I allowed myself to take advantage of the summer hours offer.  It isn’t something I regularly participate in but I needed it this week.

Of course, I never did mention to Mother Nature that this was my plan so she decided to hit us with a little rain in the afternoon.  It was OK with me though, I did some reading and I am not afraid to say I took a cat nap too!  By the time dinner rolled around I was ready to go again.

We actually had a tornado watch in affect most of the evening up until 9:30pm.  As far as I know a tornado never did make an appearance.  With me being the adventurous kind (not really) I decided to catch the sunset but chose to stay close to home for my exploration.  I drove to Delta Lake State Park as the clouds started to roll in.  The earlier rain had basically cleared the beach area and I found I had the sunset to myself.  I was running back and forth along the beach capturing images for over an hour.  It was a good way to end my work week!

I found an interesting composition which included a small, water filled depression in the sand.  I aligned myself with this small water pool and the setting sun which created a very nice line of highlights.  By including the sun I had to be careful about lens flare and as you can see in the first image I wasn’t able to remove it all with camera orientation.  I ended up using my ‘finger blocking the sun’ trick to get a second image without the flare and used Photoshop to combine the two images.

After processing the image I felt there was empty space on the left which was not adding anything to the composition.  I regretted not turning the camera into a portrait orientation while I was at the beach.  It is a practice I typically follow but in my enthusiasm over the empty beach I forgot.  I decided I still liked this image but needed to change the orientation through a drastic crop in Photoshop.  I basically threw away over a third of the pixels I had captured but the end result is the image I wanted to have.

Highlights – Start
Olympus OM-D E-M1, M. Zuiko 12-40mm f/2.8, 1/8s, 12mm, f/16, ISO 200

Highlights
Olympus OM-D E-M1, M. Zuiko 12-40mm f/2.8, 1/8s, 12mm, f/16, ISO 200