Tweaked Landscape of Tarpon Lake

I saw this tutorial today on how to fake HDR using Lightroom only. I tried it and it looked awful. So, I decided to play around a little by tweaking the colors a bit.

This was taken a little later than the other landscape from Tarpon Lake that I posted a couple days ago. The first one was first thing in the morning while there was still a little bit of mist in the air. When I shot this one, the clouds had come up a little better.

I remembered what Jim's comment about the sky being 1-2 stops lighter than the reflections in the water, so i was careful to let this one look about the same to save the reality "look". To get these colors, I added saturation and exposure to the sky and the water, and added saturation to the boardwalk. The trees were left untouched. I'm pretty happy with the results. What do you all think?

Settings used for this image before post processing were at ISO 200 in aperture priority mode, I shot this at 1/15th at F11. I chose F11 to increase the depth of field. The image was shot with my 18-55mm lens at 21mm.

Great Blue Herons

During our walk the other morning at John Chestnut, Jr Park, we noticed several Great Blue Herons nesting in the pines across an inlet on Lake Tarpon.

There was quite a lot of activity with this pair. As we watched, we saw the male (I presume) flying back and forth gathering nesting material and bringing it back to the female so she could build the nest. This is just one of the many hand offs. At one point, he joined her in the nest and they were both weaving the twigs into this huge nest. We watched them with interest for quite a while.

Unlike most of these long-legged waders, Great Blue Herons do not roost with other birds. They are usually solitary. It seems it must be different during nesting season, because there were several pairs in these trees. As a matter of fact, at one point, we saw 2 Herons on the nest, while one watched from the position of the one pictured in this photo.

I only had my trusty 55-250mm lens, so this is a crop from the original. I thought it important to the photo to include the nest in the scene. This image was shot at ISO 400, in aperture priority mode with partial metering off the birds. It was exposed at F5.6 at 1/250 to get a high enough shutter speed to stop action to prevent blurring, since it was pretty dark up in the trees.