Balbriggan beach this morning (early)

GristlyEnd

Headed down to the beach this morning to take some pics. Unfortunately it was raining but it cleared up just before the sunrise. I think I prefer the secone one more. Used a polariser filter on a Tokina ATX 12-24mm f4 lens and cleaned it up in CS2.

Hard to believe it's the same beach, there is such a huge change in light in such a short time.

davmigil

Two excellent photos. No.1 has a more pleasant balance to it, colour and exposure wise. No.2 is way more dramatic, slightly menacing, with the clouds providing interesting lead lines. Exposure on light house not as nice, but in keeping with mood of photo.

Well done

What time were these taken at?

GristlyEnd

Sunrise was at 6.17am this morning so couple of minutes before and up to 20 mins after.

I took some shots exposing for the lighthouse as well. Will probably try and combine 2 shots with exposures for the sky and lighthouse. I think they call it HDR??

elven

It's cracking light, wish I could get my act together to get out at dawn.

I do love that big diagonal line of cloud in the first one, with the different colours in the sky, and the reflections in the wet sand. I can't help but feel there's a bit too much of the wall on the right, but wouldn't want to crop out too much of the cloud at the same time. You could try a square crop though, just for a different aspect of it.

I'm a sucker for that blue colour that's in the second one, with the dramatic clouds again I think it's pretty good, if you're inclined to play in ps what I might suggest is darkening down the land in that one to make it dark dark blue, and play up the sky. The blue looks great on the lighthouse at that exposure anyway, I think.

If you want to do some blending of exposures, you are best to do it manually rather than sticking it into photomatix if you want anything like a natural looking result. I know of two good tutorials for blending exposures - one is: http://www.luminous-landscape.com/tutorials/digital-blending.shtml which is how I've been doing it so far with the mask, but there's a video tutorial at radiant vista that takes a slightly different method of saving the highlight detail which is interesting, and also gave me loads of ideas for general editing, as well as the blending exposures. That one is here: http://www.radiantvista.com/archive/video_tutorials/12/

It's worth checking out the other video tutorials on that site, they are really handy for picking up general stuff as well as photoshop shortcuts.

440Hz

Lovely shots, great work there. I agree with elven, wish I could be more motivated to get out at that time of the morning but alas... sleep always seems more important. I really love the first one, the colours and tones in the sky are just fantastic. Well done