Sunset from Shark Reef

Sunset from the west side of Lopez Island in the San Juan Islands. This area, Shark Reef, is a popular area to see seals and in some cases orcas.

This was a pretty difficult picture to capture as the dynamic range needed to be very high to account for the brightness of the sky (and sun) and the darkness in the foreground. To make images like this work, you need to use a graduated neutral density filter, which I used on this shot, but at only a two-stop difference, it really wasn't ideal. In post processing I added an additional graduated neutral density feel to better recreate what I saw to begin with.