A heavy departure from the original

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When I go to new places I always like to look at the post cards for that area. But when your confronted with clear blue skies and no clouds what-so-ever, and you see "what could be", given the right conditions, you then need to utilize what PhotoShop can do for ya.

Since this image as shown was not going to be had on this trip and I really liked the what I saw on the psot card, I turned to PhotoShop for this final image. I made the initial image with the sun coming in from the correct position and then used a previous sunset sky image from another photo.

I know some of ya don't care for utilizing multiple images for the final product, but I love to "make images" and do whatever is required to obtain what I have in mind.

BTW, all of those magazines ads that you look at and admire the images within them, look at them again...most are composits.

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Cattails on a small farm pond.

Tags:   B&W detail-studies florida-images

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Boy!, did I ever find some great mushrooms...this is far out.

If you look at the map location in Hybrid mode you can see the two trees in this image. If you also look at the fort itself and have read my discription in a past post of the Castillo de San Marcos, you can clearly see the footprint of the design. Each opposing face of the diamond directs canon cross fire making for a deadly attempt to scale the walls of this fort.

The larger tower on the left is of the opposite Bastion (diamond)on the NE corner facing the Mantazas River. The taller tower was needed to better see over the island and to the ocean for ships of plunder.

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This was the first morning of a short trip to the other side of the state at St. Augustine, the nation'a oldest permanently occupied European settlement. We stayed at Anastasia Island SP for about 9days.

Washington Oaks SP is about 20 miles south. A friend told me to go when the tide was low to get a nice sunrise with all of the rocks on the shoreline. He didn't mention the fact that the park doesn't open until 8 AM, which is very hard to do a sunrise. I climbed over the low gate and walked the 1/4 mile to the beach and found to my surpeise this. Well, as you can see the tide was low alright, but the rocks were not where I thought they would be. Actually, high tide would have been better. Since the cloud formations on the horizon were exceptional and a cool front was due to arrive the next day, I began shooting. I knew that after cool/cold fronts move through here in Florida, the next few days would be clear blue skies with no clouds.

This is a manual blend of 2 frames and I pulled the waters edge closer in to the rocks. It just looked too far away for what I wanted.

Those were the only clouds of any real compositional elements I had to work with most of all that week. Nice camping weather though.

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Tags:   sunrises st-augustine state-parks seascapes parks landscapes blending 24-70-mm Picnik florida-images

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