I headed out to the beach a few days ago in anticipation of a cloudy sunset hoping that the sun might peak through. When I got there a few rays of sun were just making it through the grayness and I kept my hopes up.
Even if there was no chance for a spectacular sunset there was always the wonderful opportunity to walk on the beach enjoying the quiet and consistent lull of the waves. Several dolphin were out on this day and they were swimming back and forth some 400 yards in what looked like feeding patterns. It was wonderful to watch them chase into the shore frothing up the surf. Photographing dolphin is very tricky as they tend to only show for less than a second and you can never tell where they are going surface.
As the light started to fade, more and more color started showing through the clouds and I knew there was a chance for a really good display. In the end I couldn’t have been more fortunate. Both the dolphin and the sky ended up putting on a incredible show.
Technical Mumbo Jumbo
This was shot with my new Nikon D800 and Tokina 11-16mm f/2.8 lens. This super wide angle DX(crop sensor) lens has terrible vignetting at 11mm on a full frame camera and is really only usable at 16mm, so this is at 16mm. I was shooting the dolphins before and bumped the ISO up to 200 and accidentally left it there for this shot. Usually I shoot landscapes with the ISO all the way down to get as much detail as possible. The D800 goes down to 50. To get everything in focus the aperture was set to f/16 which dialed up an exposure of 1.6 sec. This captured the landscape with the sky overexposed by at least 2 or maybe 3 stops. The huge dynamic range of the D800 allows me to pull this back later.
In post processing, I used lightroom and added a graduated filter to bring back the sky, which was magnificent. Usually I blend multiple photos to achieve the same results and was really impressed with the graduated filter. It was really simple and creates a stunning result. I also adjusted clarity, white balance, vibrance, contrast, highlights among other settings. Then I took it into Photoshop to clean up the sensor dust and blend the dolphin onto the background.
I hope you enjoy.
