I attended the 29th Annual Everglades Coalition Conference in Naples, Florida this past weekend. This is my second time attending this conference and I really enjoyed learning more about conservation, preservation and restoration issues affecting the Florida Everglades. I also spent some time promoting the new National Park Trolley that was recently launched by the City of Homestead. I will have another blog post specifically discussing this conference.
The purpose of this blog post is to post a few pictures I took while attending the conference. I was able to run out to the beach Thursday night before the kick-off reception to capture what turned out to be an amazing sunset. There was a large cloud bank out over the water that seemed like it might block the setting sun. I looked up the azimuth of the sunset and checked it with my compass. It turned out the sun was going to set just on the edge of the cloud bank. I set up my camera and tripod using some nearby rocks as a foreground subject and hoped that the sun would light up the clouds once it sand below the horizon. I got lucky and the sunset was beautiful to witness.
I used a slow shutter speed to cause the water to blur and give the image a more dramatic feel. I used an aperture of f18 or higher to slow the shutter speed but also to give me a nice sun star as the sun sank low on the horizon. Lastly, I used HDR to capture the full dynamic range and allow for me to see the foreground rocks as something other than black silhouettes. I was happy with the resulting photos and will likely add one of them to my gallery of images on my website.
I also took a few shots late Friday afternoon after the conference dinner to utilize the almost full moon and empty beach. I liked the result but would have preferred a cloudless sky or puffy clouds to the thin wispy clouds that were present. I tried to turn the camera at an angle that would capture as little clouds as possible and more stars. The resulting image was fun to capture and I will make a note to try and do some more full moon light photography in the future.
Click on Thumbnail for full size image.
