Eloquent Images by Gary Hart
Insight, information, and inspiration for the inquisitive nature photographer
Sunset, Point Lobos, Big Sur
I love interesting skies, but it was pretty clear that wasn’t going to happen at Point Lobos on this evening. So I looked for a strong foreground that would allow me to minimize the sky in the frame. Five stops of graduated neutral density enabled me to capture color in the sky and detail in the foreground with a single frame.
Eloquent Images by Gary Hart 
Is this an HDR image? It’s so beautiful. If it is HDR, which program, Photomatix?
I really enjoy your images, they are so very inspiring.
Regards,
Sheila Floyd
Thanks, Sheila. I’m a film shooter at heart, so all of my images are single frame capture–I don’t do HDR or any other kind of multi-image blending. The biggest problem in a scene like this is the contrast between the bright sky and the darker foreground. I used two graduated neutral density filters (3-stop reverse and 2-stop hard) to hold down the light in the sky, putting the transition right at the horizon line and then doing a little dodging and burning in Photoshop to hide the transition more completely.