Day's End

Tall ships occasionally come to Morro Bay harbor. This was photographed from a point about twenty feet above the surf line, and not far inland. We get good separation among the ripples at the shore, and they help define the relative scale of ship, sea and distant hills. And the sea! It has a luminous texture that sparkles like hand-tooled silver. I had considerable difficulty getting a good print of this, so I was particularly pleased when the effort paid off with a First Place Award at the Santa Barbara County Fair.

The image was photographed on medium format film, Fuji NPC 160. The film was scanned to yield about 100 megapixels, and processed digitally. NPC is a reasonably contrasty film, but I wanted the sea to sparkle more vividly on the print than it did from the shoreline. I used "hard light" with "high pass" in Photoshop to achieve that result. The sky and hills were left dull and gloomy, with further softening of the sky, making the contrast of the sea appear even more dramatic. The background takes a very subordinate supporting role.

This photograph differs from what the view looked like on that gloomy day. It does, however, accurately depict the mood and story that I wanted to communicate.