Title • the wyre light

In my previous entry I mentioned that I'd taken part in the annual Fleetwood Wreck Trek, a six mile walk over the sands of Morecambe Bay with guided visits to the Wyre Light (an abandoned lighthouse) and the site of Stella Marie wreckage on the North Wharf Sands. I also said that I didn't think that I'd got any decent shots of the Wyre Light.

Well, after a lot of false starts I have managed to come up with this one. It started out as part of a sequence I shot for what I thought would be a good HDR. However, having tried various methods of using the HDR sequence (the Local Adaptation and Gamma and Exposure methods in Photoshop, Photomatix Pro, and FDRTools) I had to admit defeat, as none of them would produce anything that looked at all reasonable.

So, instead, I decided to start with the +1 EV shot from the original exposure sequence, and by being careful when I processed the RAW file I was able to bring out the detail in the sky while retaining the shadow detail from the original scene. It's not the most striking of shots I've ever produced, but given that the Wyre Light is only accessible a couple of times a year - it's about two miles from shore, and only on dry land when there's an especially low tide - I'm pretty pleased to have got a shot that I'm happy to post.

Oh, and if you're interested, I've posted a 'straight' version of the RAW file I used here:

.../archives/the_wyre_light.php

This was processed using the default settings in ACR, and as you can see, it doesn't bear a great deal of resemblance to the final image :-)