January 30th, 2012

Yesterday I took a short drive to Palm Point at Newnans Lake. It is about maybe 30 minutes from where I live, a nice and easy drive. I haven’t been there in a very long time and I was hoping to be able to catch the sunset.

Palm Point Nature Park is located on a peninsula on the western shores of Newnans Lake and is a magnet for some spectacular migratory and local birds. The lake’s deep water provides great bank fishing. Wildlife is abundant. Palm Point Park is known throughout Florida as a top bird-watching location, with cormorants, osprey, bald eagles, herons, egrets, and ibis commonly seen in this area.

As I was headed towards the shore I noticed that the water was very low. I have never actually seen Newnans Lake water level so low. It has been dry lately.
This allowed me to pretty much walk around beyond the cypress trees. While checking out a got spot for my sunset shots, one of the hundreds of birds resting for the evening decided to take a dump right above me. It got my hand, my jacket and partially my camera. Come to think about it, I am surprised it only happened once. There are A LOT of birds here at sunset. If you are a “birder” I guess this is heaven. Well, minus the bird poop I guess.

There were quite a few fisherman around my “sunset spot” which made it interesting trying to compose them in or out of the picture.
The sky was pretty clean, so unfortunately there were not too many candidates for reflection. But the sunset itself was pretty spectacular and fiery orange. And lot of purple and pink tones in the water at dawn.

I still had to fight composing with my 50mm lens. At some point I will need to decide which wide angle lens I am going to purchase to replace the broken 18-55mm Nikorr. I am hesitating between the 11-16 and 12-24mm Tokina. I may try renting them both and see which one I like the most. But until then, I still need to move way back when shooting landscapes. Of course, each image is probably more than 24 Mpx since I shot 4-5 verticals on average per composition and then put them back together using Autopano Giga. I have also discover that, if you shoot the sun at sunset in two halfs, it gets much richer in color and much better exposed.

In the end had some fun taking some pictures with the iPhone. Sometimes I am surprised how nice some of these pictures turn out.
Anyway, long story short, here are a few samples:

Post Processing: Lightroom, Photoshop