High Cliff State Park Marina, WI – Real Artists Ship
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Real Artists Ship Photography Blog By Neal Grosskopf

Neal Grosskopf

High Cliff State Park Marina, WI

Before & After

It looked like it was going to be a good sunset when I checked out sunsetwx.com so I decided to go out to High Cliff and take some pictures. I wasn’t let down when I got there! I immediately went  to my favorite spot which is the marina with its long rock barriers.

Location

I took this shot at the High Cliff State Park marina which was about a 20 minutes drive from my house. High Cliff State Park is a great place to take sunset pictures as it faces West over Lake Winnebago which is about 7 miles across at this point.

Composition

After several shots from different angles, this one turned out the best with my tripod fully raised about 6 feet above the rocks. I set my camera to F11 and started firing off some bracketed shots in sets of 3. I also took a set of 3 with the foreground in focus using specific focus points on my camera so that I could blend that later in post processing.

EXIF Information

    Post Processing

    I ran the bracketed shots through Photomatix to even out the light and dark areas which is the starting point for my before and after photo. Next I did my focus stacking in Photoshop using the auto-blend layers tool. After that I did global changes to the image in Lightroom. Finally following up with local adjustments in Lightroom. Overall editing time I estimate to be about 3 hours.

    Software Used

    Lightroom
    Photomatix
    Photoshop

    Techniques Used

    Focus Stacking
    High-Dynamic-Range

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