All - Thank you for the kind words. Sunsets during winter around here are great if you can find a clear horrizon and some clouds (although clouds are usually not a problem). There was a great sunset the night before, but I could not get out of work in time to catch it. It looked like it was going to be another nice one... so with a lot of rushing around and my wife picking up dinner for me, I was able to make it to the lake just in time to catch the sun going behind the dunes.
There is always some post work, but it was pretty minimal; and I usually do only enough to make it look like what I saw. To start with, I used a Grad ND filter at the camera. Processing was done in LR, and for the first picture I posted this is what was done:
In this case, the sun was below the horrison and the clouds were positioned so the sun was lighting them up from the under side. The light also reflected off the clouds down to the lake so everything was very colorful. Here is a shot when there was more clouds overhead and lite up from underneath. I did not post this because the ice was moving to much and blurred.
- On this one, I changed White Balance because AWB made the ice unnaturally blue. Changed to "shade" because the sun was down for quite a while, and was getting fairly dark.
- +0.14 on the exposure
- +20 (on a scale of 0-100) on fill light
- Clarity to +22 (on a scale of -100 to +100)
- Minimal sharpening (Radius=1, Amount=25, Detail=25, Masking=0)
- NR at 28 (luminance), detail at 50%
- I check the Lens Profile Correction to get rid of that nasty magenta fring that the 24-105L leaves.
Silver Lake-1107.jpg by westmichigan, on Flickr