Provincetown, MA. A place near and dear. (Part 1.)

I wrote the 2nd part first and the 1st part last if that makes much sense. I wanted to separate the HDR and shutter snaps, from the wildlife photography with our trip to Provincetown, MA. One thing that I have taken from learning HDR is that it tends to enhance the overcast skies by pulling out more detail then might be visually apparent. Besides the first photograph the rest were all taken in a five frame brackets of 1-stop spacing and tone mapped using Photomatrix Pro 3. There wasn’t a batch process done. Each image really called for it’s own tweaking to find the personality of the scene.

We have been to Cape Cod two other times and for some reason never noticed the Cranberry Bogs. We always wanted to see them, but never ran into them before. Shows you how much great stuff there truly is out there. Funny thing is that as soon as we found one they were everywhere. Even in places we have traveled by before. A tad embarrassing to admit, haha. For this photograph I didn’t set a black and white point. It was one of those days where you point, click, and your done. I really wanted to find a way to make it pop and I resorted to a favorite Nik software plug-in of mine ‘Tonal Contrast’. I upped the saturation to +40 and checked off the “conventional high pass filter” to see what it would do. Through experimentation it gave me exactly what I wanted. I shot this in a road runner and the wild coyote style I think.

Provincetown is a place of acceptance and a love of expression. It really is a great to visit in the ‘off’ season to avoid the crowds. The ‘off’ season as I write it isn’t the off season for us. It is the perfect time of the season! The spring thaw is bringing a period of nutrient turn over due to temperature gradients in the water (water is heaviest at 3degrees celcius so as the temperatures change the water moves basically dragging nutrients with it due to the water current cycle and thermoclines in the ocean)  in the oceans attracting high quantities of fish and zooplankton which is the main reason the whales come to this thriving location. If your smart you’ll go from late April to early June and avoid those crowded tourist months.

Great food is another item that is never in short quanitity hear. The Lobster Pot is a famous restaurant located in the heart of commercial street. It is two floors, faces the ocean and makes some of the most amazing, mouth watering food you could imagine. The menu is huge, accomadates food lovers of all kinds, has the freshest catch and you can keep on coming back as you couldn’t finish the menu in a week if you tried! Just one of the many great places to chow down.

One more version of the Lobster Pot. I think it gives it a more of a fisherman’s town feel. Also shows the dreary day that had set in toward dusk. I did try to make this photograph more of an illustration by boosting the strength of the HDR effects and also boosting the saturation.

On our way home we tried to stop at as many locations as possible. After going numb trying to shoot in the storm by the shore I moved to a spot I thought the waves would really be raging. Turned out I was wrong and the waves were more spread out rather then crashing the shoreline. However; leaving nauset beach we lucked out with photographs of the Nauset Lighthouse. It was still pouring and I was taking on fresh water both in the car and on my lens, but I kept firing my bracketed exposures to get the images I wanted. The second version I applied the Tonal Contrast filter and boosted the saturation and contrast in the shadows just a bit more. I really love how it spikes the detail in the shingles and the side of the house. (Used the Magic Cleaner microfiber cloth to remove the water and found it to be perfect. It is incredibly absorbitive compared to your average cloth. Very happy with it.)

If I can find a moral of this story when it comes to this two part series (sorry for tense issues with writing this backwards ); it is to always keep an open eye to multiple avenues of photography. It is definitely good to have your photography concentrated so you can focus your strengths in your work, but all too often we can get stuck in a rut. Moving ourselves to see other things in common places can aid not only your enjoyment of the location your visiting and take back more memories with you, but it will also expand your photography and bring it to new levels.