If you remember Saturday’s Down the creek post, this shot is the same evening, from the same bridge, only looking up the creek, where it passes behind the houses that face Gooch’s Beach. Here again it is the quality of the light, and the reflections of the sky in the water that form the foundation of the composition. (This is a tidal creek and we are seeing it here brim full of tidal backflow…it shrinks to creek size at low tide.)

Because the low sun was right there, just out of view in this shot, the only way to capture anything like the naked eye view this was HDR. I used the camera’s built in Backlight/HDR mode (which takes multiple exposures and stacks them for extended range), and adjusted the result in Lightroom. Though at first I dismissed the way too flat results of the in-camera processing, I am finding that with experience in processing them in Lighroom, it actually works pretty well…at least in some situations.

Nikon Coolpix P500 at 22mm equivalent, nominal exposure f3.4 @ 1/1000th @ ISO 160. Backlight/HDR mode.

Processed for intensity, Clarity, and Sharpness in Lightoom.