Title • the sky rolled down

I've still got quite a few shots to post from my trip to Austin (TX) but thought I'd post this one first. It's one of two images I shot yesterday, both of which were taken on Blackpool beach: facing south towards the South Pier. And in case you're wondering about the processing ... I was out shooting with a one-to-one client who wanted to learn more about shooting and processing HDR images so shot a range of brackets, including a few like this one that included the sun.

When I ran this sequence through Photomatix though I wasn't especially happy with any of the tone mapped variants I came up with so decided to manually blend three of the original exposures (the darkest shot, two EV lighter, and two EV lighter again). The net result is a rather moody, dark image, but given that the sky contained a lot of interesting detail I'm happy with the end result.

If you hover your mouse over the 'show the original' link (bottom-right of the image) you'll see the three shots I used to construct the final version.

captured camera lens focal length aperture shutter speed shooting mode exposure bias metering mode ISO flash image quality RAW converter image editor plugins (etc) cropped?

10.12am on 10/2/11 Canon 5D Mark II EF 16-35mm f/2.8L II USM 16mm f/11.0 1/8000, 1/2000, & 1/500 manual n/a evaluative 100 no RAW Camera Raw Photoshop CS5 none minor