As summer winds down, so do the available good sunsets in Wisconsin. Because of that I’ve been trying to get out and shoot some photos when it seems like there may be a good sunset or sunrise. I took a chance recently and it ended up being a dud. Usually when I realize that the conditions aren’t going to be that great and I’m already out shooting, I start experimenting more.

Location

I woke up around 4:30am and drove the hour to Algoma. I originally had a different shot in mind, but when I got there, there was a lot of fishermen standing in the way of where I was going to take a picture. I then made a knee-jerk decision and drove to the other pier. Once there I had a second shot I wanted to get, only to be greeted by even more fishermen. Finally I found a spot near the water where there were no people nearby.

Composition

I expirimented with some long exposure pictures for awhile. The sun never came up above the overcast clouds so I had plenty of time to mess around. I was just about to get in my car and leave when I decided to walk up to some brush near the water. I discovered there were spiderwebs all over the brush. I then decided to take some more pictures since none of my other ones were going to be that interesting. I took 2 sets of 3 bracketed shots. These were focus stacked so that in one set the spiderwebs were in focus and in another, the lighthouse was in focus.

Post Processing

The post processing for this took quite awhile. The shot started out pretty uninteresting so I had to ‘rescue’ the shot from mediocrity. This is usually bad idea because the shot requires more processing than a shot where the conditions where good. The focus stacking alone probably took an hour as I was trying different methods. I finally ended up just using Photoshop’s default auto-blend feature and then did some custom blending. I also ran the shots through Photomatix and did my final edits in Lightroom.

Software Used

Lightroom

Photomatix

Photoshop

Techniques Used

Focus Stacking

High-Dynamic-Range

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