Manhattan beach pier sunset portal

I have a handful of images that stick with me over the years and this is one of them. I was considering printing this one on metal for the living room so wanted to take a fresh look at it. Back when I shot and edited this in 2013, I was restricted to auto blending programs such as photomatix which doesn’t always do the best jobs in tough scenes. Since then I have learned a lot about luminosity masks and it has given me the freedom to blend images much cleaner to my liking. This one was always difficult as the dynamic range of the scene varied widely. What also made it difficult is that the water movement from the ocean was different in each exposure. But I think I got it to a point where I like it, maybe a few more final touch ups. There is now a lot more shadow detail under the pier, and the sky is a quite a bit more controlled in the highlights. If I had a choice I’d choose to retake the shots with my full frame, but I’ve never been able to recreate the scene with low tide, a gorgeous pre-sunset sky, and the awesome light beam coming through the end. Always tough to figure out what to personally print because I hope that my images and processing will continue to improve. But this image stuck with me this long and while my editing may improve over the next few years, I feel like its sufficient enough to portray this scene in all its glory.

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