On Friday, the grey skies that had dominated for days on end finally threatened to break.  As I drove home after work, I noted some dramatic skies with amazing cloud formations taking shape and decided to head out as soon as I could.  I stopped home long enough to grab my camera and tripod and then made my way out to Marblehead Neck.  I stopped at a number of spots along the way and will share those in the days to come.  One of my final destinations was Castle Rock where I took this view after the more classic one looking back up toward Chandler Hovey.

In this image, I had noticed that the ocean was forming thin tendrils as it met the beach along the far coast of this section of Marblehead Neck.  At this point, the sky had taken on a great yellow-orange color near the horizon under these dramatic clouds.  I composed the image to include just enough water between the Neck and Tinker’s Island in the background.  Between the tendrils, island and the bird seen in a larger view, the scene seemed just about perfect.

How this image was created:

The light here was just about perfect.  I had bracketed my exposure (shooting a +1/0/-1 EV) to insure that I had captured as much light as I could without blowing out the highlights.  As it turned out, the 0 EV exposure was just about perfect.  I started in Adobe Lightroom and made some adjustments to the shadows, clarity and tone curve.  I then brought the image into Photoshop where I used luminosity masking to bring out areas of contrast – notably the tendrils of ocean water and Tinker’s island against the great glow of the gradually setting sun.  A bit of sharpening back in Lightroom and the image was ready to go.