Sunrises and sunsets keeps amazing me. You still can be surprised and see new wonderful variations. This photo is hardly processed. In Lightroom I have increased the contrast a bit, lowered the clarity a little and then raised the vibrance slightly. Not a lot compared to what I do to some of my other photos.

Tip: Crop dead areas away photo
In the beginning I didn’t want to cut away pixels. The more pixels, the better. I’m still struggling with this, but I have learned that some photos really get a much stronger composition by cropping them.

This particular photo doesn’t have much of an interesting foregrund and the sky continues upwards as orange. It becomes dead areas with nothing interesting. By cutting that away, I cut away dead zones and is left with the good stuff and that makes a stronger composition.

Doubtful Sound, South Island, New Zealand – bigger and much much more desolate than Milford Sound. Less dramatic though, but very very beautiful.

This is first edited in Lightroom, then exported to Photoshop, where I did a Topaz Filter and then some more adjustmens, a little noise reduction, and then back to Lightroom for the final adjustments.

EXIF: 28mm (28-300mm lens), ISO 400, f/3.5, 1/125 sec.
I used ISO 400 to keep the shutter speed fast, because is was on a moving boat and tripods was not possible. Therefore also f/3.5, which is to high normally for landscapes.

This is a 5 shot HDR. I also attached a soft grad ND 2-stop filter and a 3 stop filter to get a longer exposure time. It is a fairly clean Photomatix image, only a little Photoshop’ing to keep the boat and raft sharp.