Beach Self Me

I seldom make photographs of my self. My daughter, Kiran thinks I take dorky selfies. I most likely do.

I'm not sure why I chose to do a selfie. The thought just happened upon me. It took several tries to get the timing right on the timer. I set the camera to 10s, but the 20s worked best. In my rush to get into position, I sat down a bit too hard on the sand and hurt my tail bone. Ouch!

Almost Sunrise

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It's our second day here in the Outer Banks and I am already starting to losing track of which day of the week it is. It feels like Sunday -- again. Today, as we yesterday is cloudy. I was exhausted so didn't get up until around 6:30 AM. I looked out the west-facing entrance and saw the orange glow of the sunrise from the beach. I excitedly rushed to put on some shorts before running out the door with my camera. But the journey to the beach took to long. The sand between the land and the beach was too soft and got bogged down. I arrive at the beach too late to capture the glory of this mornings' sunrise.

I found a dune and set up the camera to capture the last bit of orange in the sky. While setting up the camera I notice small piercing bits of pain all over my legs. It took me a while to realise that some small black flies -- so tiny it was to even see them in the dim morning light -- had covered my legs and my pants. Ouch!

This is a three image HDR shot as a long exposure on my Nikon D5100 with a Tokina 12-24mm f/4 AT-X Pro DX-II and Hoya 77mm NDx400 HMC neutral density filter at ISO 100 f/11. The images were combined in Nik's HDR Efx Pro. I normally used Photomatix Pro. That software is installed on my iMac but I am editing with my MacBook Air and I forgot to install Photomatix Pro before the trip.

I used a filter adapter to use the 52mm Hoya on the 77mm score size of the lens. I cropped the image to reduce some shadows at the edge. The following was applied to the HDR image in Adobe Lightroom.

  • Exposure: 0.95
  • Contrast: +25
  • Whites: +44
  • Blacks: -9
  • Clarity: +17