I never really appreciated sunsets until our first visit to Maui back on ‘06. It wasn’t long after that I started to stop and take note of sunsets from wherever I happened to be at that time of the evening.

This shot is from Ephraim, WI in Door County, just outside the condo we stayed at in April this year. While the colors and the water might bear similarities to its counterpart in the Pacific Ocean, there’s still that little bit of Aloha missing.

A pano stitched together with from 7 images I took during the last trip to Door County. If you’ve seen and read notes about that trip, that blue sky will seem rather out of place given the weather conditions I ran into, but it was a welcome sight.

An HDR look at the same building in Ephraim, Door County that I shot a close-up of earlier in the year. A rustic and colorful structure that’s begging to be photographed in high dynamic range if there ever was one.

Here’s another HDR image I put together from the same short photo shoot as this one.

This image is obviously more lifelike, with the previous image having a more artful feel to it (courtesy of work done in Topaz Adjust).  It’s been exciting for me this last month or so as I’m learning more on the post production side, and enjoy having the flexibility to take similar shots and work them into completely different results.

I never thought it would be this easy to awaken the artist within, as Rick Sammon puts it.

There were so many projects I want to attempt this past weekend in Door County had the rain not washed away most of the time slotted for shooting. So when I did get the 2 or so hours of nice enough weather, I scattered to grab a sampling of a little of everything.

This is one of the results of the AEB bracketed shots I took for my continued HDR practice, sprinkled with a little Spicify love from Topaz Adjust. I’m using PhotoMatix to do the HDR processing, and while I’m just starting to get the hang of it, I still haven’t purchased the full license yet.

That means I can only save images using the Tone Compressor engine without a watermark and not the Details Enhancer.  The Details Enhancer has given me some really nice results for another HDR sequence of this scene, as well as a few others I’ve worked with so far. I’ll likely be buying the license in a few weeks, so I’ll have more examples after that.

Other Projects
Aside from the few AEB sequences I shot, I also had the aerial shoot and even brought out the IR filter for a few shots. It’s going to be a busy next couple of days, but I’ll try to get to posting a few more from the trip this week.

This was the sunset that welcomed us back to Door County when we arrived in Ephraim last night. In fact, it was the only thing that was here to welcome us. Even the office at the resort was closed already, which made for a nice, quiet evening.

I wasn’t entirely ready to start shooting pictures yet, so I snapped this one with (now Cindy’s) Canon SD890 on the way to dinner. I’m hoping we have just as lovely conditions tonight and tomorrow so I can get a little more focused for these.

We’re heading back up to Door County, WI this afternoon for an extended weekend, so I thought I’d kick off a mini-series today. We’re staying at the Edgewater Resort in Ephraim this trip, and though we’ve never stayed there before, we’ve driven passed it numerous times and even snapped some photos of it back in September.

A look at the Visitor Center in Ephraim, Wisconsin.