Dunbeg Fort

NAME Dunbeg Fort

This shot was taken at Dunbeg Fort, Dingle bay, Ireland. With only a short amount of time avaliable I had to set up quickly. I wanted to include some forground interest so I had to stand on the ancient architecture with my tripod so I could see over this horrible fence that would have otherwise ruined the shot. The foliage as it was tooked a bit messy so I used a slow shutter speed to blur it and not distract the viewer from the rocks and water.

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Location Dunbeg Fort
Date 21/08/08
Time 15:20
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Camera Body Nikon D300
Lens 18-55mm 1:3.5 5.6 G
Focal Length 18mm
Shutter Speed 1/10
Aperture f22
ISO 100

Tripod
Manfrotto 785SHB
Filters
Cokin ND8 light grad, ND4, Hoya circular polariser

Processing EDIT 2: Desaturated by -15, made colours more realistic

Processing for this picture and the newer ones in my gallery require a much more lengthly stint in my D Darkroom!
And I though, to show any curious begginers and let them in on some useful editing techniques, here is from opening to saving, my edit.

I edited in PS CS3. But these techniques can be followed almost as accurately on CS and CS2

before opening in main PS i did a raw conversion. this mainly consisted of, fixing the exposure slightly, adding saturation, contrast and removing vignetting <---- freaking pain

Open > duplicate layer > Image > adjustments > selective colour
Channels: black > black +15, white > white - 15, and some fiddling around with the blues, adding magenta and stuff. > flatten image
> Duplicate
I then broke the image down into the main parts (ie sky, rocks, water...) and did a feathered levels adjustment of each (feather radius of 100px)
[flatten, duplicate]
Now comes the doging and burning.
size set to 50, hardness 20 and channel on highlights I went over most of the image like the clouds and the highlights on the rock. Vise versa with the burn tool.....
Finally I used the high pass filter set to overlay and 45% opacity to sharpen, and then an unsharp mask to finish
All done

[a separate high pass adjustment was made for the rocks so as not to sharpen and ruin the water and sky too much. this was set to quite a high opacity and filter thingy.