Fun with the sun on Sanibel Island

Posted on June 04, 2016 by April Lahti | 0 comments

I recently had the pleasure of spending a week with family on Sanibel Island, FL.  Our favorite activities were bike riding, relaxing by the pool, walking the beach hunting for shells, and kayaking.  Of course, photography is always high on the list for me and I was hoping to get some new great beach photos for PictureItPersonal. The weather was perfect and I wasn’t disappointed!

I was eager to try out my new polarizing filter  which I would recommend to anyone with a DSLR shooting in conditions where there is any kind of glare (like what you get from water or ice).  The filter reduces those bright reflections (just like your polarizing sunglasses) and deepens colors.  As you can see in this photo, the reflection on the water is cut down resulting in an exposure that isn’t thrown off as much by the brightness of the sun:

 

The other challenge of taking a sunset photo is that when you are photographing such a bright object--even with a polarizing filter- you will have areas of the image that are over or underexposed just because of the vast difference in brightness within the same frame. The camera cannot expose properly for both. The only way to correct for this would be a gradient filter (which darkens the sky) or taking two separate exposures and putting them together later in an editing program.  Here I took one shot for the sky, and one for the sand:

Of course, stitching these together would be tricky. Because of the movement of the water, things won’t line up easily.  I’ll let you know if I figure it out!


I had another photo idea while at the beach.  I wrote “love” in the sand with shells and left room above them for your names.  Coming soon to PictureItPersonal.com:

What do you think?

Posted in beach photography, photo tips


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