Edit : I used a gradient mask to simulate a reverse GND to brighten the top of the sky, made the sky less red and used an excellent new sharpening technique of Marc Adamus.

Downsize the image to around 1700 pixels on it's longest side, apply 2 to 4 standard sharpening filters until it's oversharpened and grainy, now downsize it and recover the lost color saturation experiment with each image!




This shot describes Betty's Bay. There's always those clouds that form as the mountain air meets the sea air, the wind is always blowing and you can always see the sand blowing over the crest of the dunes. Beautiful place nonetheless.

I just spent a sunset and sunrise there. Discovered some amazing patterns and flowers on the dunes for which I'll be going back a lot and we have a house there so it's quite convenient to drive the 160km's for a sunset and sunrise.

My first decent purist twilight shot? Just RAW adjustments. The RAW tool is very powerful if you know where to adjust what.

Sigma 10-20mm
Lee 0.9 hard...about the Lee's. They have a slight brown cast, but if you just switched from Cokin like I have, you're in heaven. Definitely worth the R800 ($100/70euro) each I payed. I can now shoot into a sunset confidently knowing that the colors will be very accurate.

2 more shots to come from this trip

Betty's Bay, South Africa