Recently, my wife and I went on out honeymoon to Maldives. We visited this past June 2021 because it was the off season and still during Covid-19. This meant that the prices were more affordable and there were less people which was great. Fortunately, although it was rain season, we didn’t get any rain the whole week. I have always wanted to visit Maldives because of the water huts and the beautiful clear water. We stayed in a water hut during this week and I was not let down.
This shot is of the path from our water hut to the island during sunrise. Typically, I don’t do sunrise photos because of how early I need to wake up. However, maybe due to the jet lag, I woke up early quite often on this trip and ventured out for sunrises. Another benefit of sunrise photography is there are barely any people awake. That is, apart from the island workers who probably thought I was weird for wandering around at 5:00am.
In planning, I knew I wanted to shoot this at either sunrise or sunset because I wanted to ensure the path lights were lit. I thought these lights added a cool feel to the photo and really led your eyes to the middle. I bracketed this photo to get the full dynamic range and edited the individual brackets in Lightroom before I brought them to Photoshop. In Photoshop, I combined the photos and did a few lighting adjustment to reach the final product. Hope you like the results!

