This is the Bass Harbor Head Lighthouse near Acadia National Park, in Maine. You can see one of my other shots taken in Acadia National Park at Monument Cove here. I should start off by mentioning that this was one of several hundred shots that I took while visiting Maine. Rarely do I take one shot and get exactly what I wanted. Instead, I will stay at spots for an hour or longer and just watch the conditions of the sky and take many shots. Also, sometimes I use several shots to make one photo. That is the case here. I took one shot where I really liked the water, but not the lighthouse. Then, I took another shot where I really liked the lighthouse but not the water. The solution – bringing the best elements of both photos into one. Specifically, I wanted the glow of the Bass Harbor Head Lighthouse to show in the photo. However, the light was brightest once the sun was down. So I used layers in Photoshop to merge on the red lighthouse glow and viola.
Apart from merging photos, I mostly just adjusted the RAW image file for this photo. Perhaps the biggest benefit to shooting RAW is the amount of detail you can extract from images. This makes it possible to nondestructively tweak photos like this.
Anyway, hope you like the results!
