My wife Linda joined me in the car and we headed to a beach we hadn't been to in many years!  Bunche Beach was uncrowded.  Plenty of parking.  As usual, a few waited to photograph the sun as it went below the horizon and then they wrongly assumed it was all over with.  For a nature photographer, it was just about ready to get good, really good!  I love the next 15 to 30 minutes after the sun sets.  That's when I captured this one I call, "Bunche Beach Beauty."

For those of you that want to know the facts behind this photo, I used my Nikon D750 DSLR with my favorite landscape lens, a Nikon 14-24mm 2.8.  I always shoot in RAW rather than a compressed JPEG format.  That way, I have captured all of the data, all of the beauty.  I also attached to my lens the NiSi S5 150 Filter Holder System;  stacked with a Circular Polarizer and a Soft Nano Neutral Density Graduated 0.9 filter.  The darker part of the filter was over the sky portion to decrease the brightness and the clear part was over the reflection pools to allow as much light as possible in that area.  Of course, all of this was firmly anchored on my carbon fiber Manfroto 190CXPro4 tripod attached to my FlexShooter Pro head.  I had my tripod all the way down to about 20 inches off the sand to get the best angle for the sky color in the reflection pools.  I experimented with a wide variety of exposure triangle settings (shutter speed, aperture and ISO) over a half hour of shooting but this image was captured at 1/60 sec., f3.5, ISO 500 and the lens was at its widest 14mm setting.  And, afterward, I processed the picture in Adobe Lightroom to adjust the lighting balance and coax out the beautiful colors we had observed.

Now, that was way too much detail for some of you.  But the bottom line is, if I hadn't been out there shooting, I only would have heard about it from others.  Linda and I both left saying, "we have to do this more often."  And we will.  God's paintings are incredible.  I was able to accurately capture a moment in time of His spectacular color show so you could have it on your wall to be inspired every single day.  I hope you enjoy this image and many more here on my website.  SHOP HERE