Santa Monica at Sunset

Once again I visited the beautiful Santa Monica beach at sunset yesterday evening, I have been out there many times before but last night gave me the opportunity to try out my new 5D mk III.

The first shot above is of one of the lifeguard huts out there on the beach, three exposures merged into one tone mapped HDR image and then moved into photoshop for some color correction, contrast and level adjustments, i'm fairly happy with the result, although shooting wide open at 17mm on a full frame camera does produce some vignetting.

Second shot is of the pier about 15 minutes after sunset, this is one of a few 15 second exposures I took here, a couple of times the ocean washed up and moved my tripod, at this point it also started to get realy cold, so with wet feet I called it a day and headed home, I also used a Singh-Ray gold-n-blue polarizer on this shot.

Overall not a bad start with my mk III, the camera is a big improvement over the original 5D, image quality and performance have improved greatly, didn't get a chance to use the in-camera HDR this time round, but am looking forward to taking it out again very soon.