"Some Enchanted Evening"

"Some Enchanted Evening"
© David A. Ziser

This is an image later in the evening during the rehearsal dinner of my recent northern Michigan wedding. The restaurant’s location was just perfect to enjoy the beautiful setting sun over Lake Michigan. The crowds had pretty much disappeared from the beach this evening – those that were left I removed with the content aware tool in CS6 ;~)

 

The setting sun was working it’s wonderful cinematic magic on the horizon. I thought to enhance that cinematic sunset magic by making an HDR exposure of the scene – this is my result.

I feel that the new HDR features and my Canon 5D Mark III camera combined with the beautiful view of the setting sun gave me a beautiful image that truly does capture the feeling of the image’s title above.

 

In the original photograph I thought there was just a little too much space between the trees on the left and the umbrella you see in the foreground on the right. I took the image into Photoshop CS6 and used the “Content Aware Scale” feature to reduce that space just a bit and get the proper visual balance I was looking for in my final composition.

Going back into Lightroom 4, I tweaked the vibrancy, clarity, and saturation sliders just a bit to get the finished result I was looking for. I think the simplicity of this composition, the beautiful, rich, contrasting colors, and the peaceful, serene nature of the image make for a great landscape image.

Camera specs: Canon 5D Mark III fitted with Tamron 28–300 mm VC lens at 28mm, F6.3 at 1/50 second, ISO 400. Enjoy! – David