Dwight Dock at Blue Hour | Landscape Photography
Author: Dan Amyotte
Originally Posted: Tuesday January 15th 2019
I’ve been visiting Dwight for a few years now and the town dock has always been a captivating subject for me. The pier features a quaint canopy trimmed with decorative lights. In my initial visits I would be eaten alive by bugs trying to capture the right image. It was a struggle. I eventually learnt my lesson and prepared myself by not exposing an inch of skin and bathing in bug spray. When I first arrived at the dock I was met with a less than stellar sunset which was disappointing as the last few days of sunsets proved to be stunning examples of pink and purple hues.
This night however was devoid of any dramatic clouds or intense colours. As the sun set, the sky remained a cloudy overcast blue. With the light falling I decided to slow the shutter and smooth out the water which blended it beautifully into the sky. As a landscape photographer, you either have to be very patient waiting sometimes hours or days for the right setting or you just have to improvise and work with what nature gives you.
Another problem I encountered was that the town was expanding the dock and had installed ugly orange construction fencing at the rear. I don’t always highlight any editing and retouching work I’ve done on images but thought I’d share my process. I’ve included the original image and the final version which removed the fencing. If there is interest I may post a video into my Photoshop workflow.
Before I tackled the fencing, I wanted to add a little drama to the sky and brought down the exposure a bit and increased blues by scaling down the temperature. I also added a bit of warmth to the dock and lighting to give a bit of contrast with the blues. From there I added a very slight smoothing filter to the water to get rid of any imperfections. And then it was a matter of fixing the construction fencing with the clone stamp, I used a lot of masking in order to keep the canopy pillars intact. And there you have it.
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