Incredible pink sunset

New Journal 8 – The slow life

This lovely Chilean town is affecting us. Its gentle pace and friendly people seem to have turned our ‘chill out’ mode to fully active. We stroll from place to place, pier to pier, church to church looking for good compositions at a snail’s pace, enjoying the perfect, crisp autumn air and chatting to locals.

On Saturday night, the sunset was truly spectacular. I headed to the jetty above and found a half a dozen photographers already there. To my surprise, all of them were locals – not a single tourist among them. While setting up a shot, an elderly gentlemen was proudly showing me photos he’d taken recently. Wanting to capture the fading light, I smiled and looked at the images but carefully positioned my tripod and camera at the same time.

Shortly after, a youngish girl approached me asking if I could show her how to use her camera. She’d had it for a couple of weeks and really wanted to create good imagery – I liked her enthusiasm. My Spanish, sadly, didn’t quite have the depth to really be of use to her. One thing I hope she took on board was the absolute need for a tripod.

Moving around the jetty, testing new compositions, I smiled and nodded to the more serious photographers. We sat silently and watched the sun slowly dip behind the mountains. Sometimes I forget to enjoy the scenes I’m shooting. Sometimes the scene is so beautiful it’s impossible not to enjoy it.

I moved to the left of the pier and was sitting on the sand. Just as I focused the camera on the distant mountains, I felt something jumping on me. I looked up to find a cute puppy had escaped the shackles of his masters and was jumping up and down, trying to lick my face. I played around and threw a stick for him for a minute or two while his owners came to collect him, apologising. I didn’t mind at all – there was still lots of colour in the sky to capture.

I continued my walk along the shore until I reached a small naval ship. I asked the sailors if I could photograph it. Looking surprised at the fact I’d asked for permission they waved their hands and said ‘Of course you can’.

By this point blue hour was setting in. I continued to shoot until the light was too low. I slowly headed home and wondered what my final images would be like.

Today’s Photo – The wooden jetty at Puerto Natales

You can learn to create this image in my Luminosity Mask tutorial

My first image from that night. I manually blended the two exposures which took a matter of minutes using luminance masks. I had to remove a huge amount of orange/yellow colour cast from the street lights behind. Although this seemed to create a large problem at first, it proved to be incredibly beneficial.

I was able to make a very precise selection of the sticks using Select>Color Range in Photoshop. Then I simply desaturated the wood. However, I also saved this selection of the sticks for later. Then I applied a detail enhancement layer in Nik Color Efex. This was only applied to the sticks using the selection I’d previously saved.

Before the Joys of Post-Processing