Portland Sunrise

Captured in: Cape Elizabeth, ME

Seen here is an early morning capture of one of my favorite lighthouses -- the Portland Head Light. This image was captured just shortly after sunrise in Portland Harbor.

The Portland Head Light was built in 1791, and was the first lighthouse constructed in Maine.

* * * * * * * * * *

Some notes about this image...

Truth be told, I had to do a bit of cleanup work on this one... The original shot had a number of distractions (poles, objects in the driveway, etc.), and it also needed some dodging & burning, color grading, and some additional Photoshop tweaks as well.

I also had to do a bunch of cloning to get to this final image... Normally there's a monster sized flag pole stationed right in front of the building. At that time of the morning there are no flags on it, and it was rather distracting -- just didn't add anything to the shot.

I've always wanted to capture the front of the lighthouse (without that obstruction), especially as sunrise is in close proximity to the light from this location. Going super wide and standing in front of the flagpole wasn't going to give me the shot I was looking for -- not to mention the lawn is off limits anyway.

The only way to get this particular sunrise image was to perform some PS surgery to remove the pole. After some painstaking edits to remove it - replace any left over holes in the windows, roof, ground and sky, I finally had the image I was looking for.

* * * * * * * * * *

"Portland Sunrise" is an HDR image that was tone mapped from a single shot.

The resulting HDR image was processed using a combination of ACR, Photomatix, and Photoshop (includes the use of Topaz Labs plugins -- Adjust, Clean, Denoise, Glow and LensFX).
Read less