Harbor View (Write-up)

Harbor View - © John Kivus, 2010

My family and I took a trip to New Bern, NC recently. Though I had never been to that area, my mother and father had spent a day there on a vacation a year ago and she had been looking forward to going back. I was thinking it would be similar in ambience to a place like Wilmington, with places to eat down by the water. Strangely, the only place to eat by the water is a local HIlton, though there are rumors you can view the water from the roof of Captain Ratty’s in town. My father and I wanted to go to the Captain Ratty’s route, however, my mother decided she would rather eat at the hotel. That meant my father and I were outvoted. After the meal we took a walk down by the water and I took advantage of any docks that didn’t have their “keep out” signs up.

This image is actually an HDR that I took with my zipshot tripod while standing just off one of the docks. I had liked the shot originally (I personally love the look of HDR water, especially having applying the Tonal Contrast Filter from Color Efex Pro), however, when taking multiple exposures manually (as I’ve said before, my camera doesn’t do autobracketing for RAW files), it means that it takes about 20-30 seconds to fire off all my images. This was particularly problematic for me on this shot because it meant the boats were moving slightly in each image. In Photomatix, this meant that my final image had this little bit of autofocus / blurring around the boats and dock. It was hardly noticeable, but if you looked at the image for awhile, then your eyes would really start to correct it and you’d almost get a headache. Now, I don’t pretend to be a photographic master by any stretch of the imagination, however, I know I don’t want my images to give people headaches. Thankfully, the new Photoshop CS5 HDR processing’s anti-ghosting capabilities fixed that problem and I was left with a shot that hopefully is not headache inducing.