I was lucky enough to spend a week in the Bend, OR area for a family vacation. Full of good times, beautiful locations and fun adventures! Mountain biking, White Water Rafting, ATV'ing, Photography, hiking, lightning, sun, card games, Timbers winning and the USA Women's Soccer team becoming World Champions!!
Several days worth of photography with beautiful weather for all sunrises and sunsets along the Southern Oregon Coast. You definitely won't be disappointed with these pictures. The southern part of the Oregon Coast is one of the most photogenic and amazing places you'll see.
This was a night I was reminded of how unpredictable and powerful the ocean can be, while being beautiful at the same time. This night marks one of the more intense and memorable nights in a scary sort of way. Read on to see what happened on this night in Pacific City.
Certain scenes and iconic places near where you live may seem like old bland objects. Learning to look at them in a new light can really bring them back to life. If you normally visit a beach and walk a certain path, go the other direction and see a whole new world of beauty. Exploring close to home is a wonderful and exciting thing to do, and when you do, you'll find a renewed passion and awe for the things you once thought to be boring.
This photo was taken back in April during a pretty big rainy spell we had. It was nearing the end as you can see with the clouds breaking a bit in the background. The rain visible up front is what drew my attention to this particular spot. During the winter, this type of scene is not uncommon as we get a lot of rain, and some incredible clouds that often break nearing the sunset hours creating some fantastic drama in the sky. It doesn't always work out like that, and in this case it was one of those times. Still provided some great pictures, but never did quite break enough for my liking.
In order to capture the background, rain and foreground the way I wanted to, I shot a 3 bracket exposure with 2 stops between each capture. I processed this image using NIk HDR Efex Pro2 and Lightroom 4.
I started with some of the presets built into Nik Software and then tweaked the options for a look closer to what I was going for. Started out with the Deep2 preset, and then added some custom control points to adjust the exposure, contrast, saturation in very specific locations. After that I added a little sharpness and noise reduction in Lightroom.
Seal Rock, OR during some April showers.
