Since living in California, I have really got into photographing beaches as well as piers since there is such an abundance of them all around me. The pier picture here is located at Manhattan Beach in Southern California. This beach is pretty far North from where I live around so I hadn’t had the chance to visit this spot until recently. I kept seeing other pictures of this spot on 500px.com and they looked interesting enough that I had wanted to check it out. I had taken a trip up North one weekend and decided to check it out because there were other spots I was going to as well so the somewhat long ride would be well spent. When I arriving here my attention was drawn to the pier and the interesting structure at the end of it. I already had formed the idea in my mind at this point that I wanted to include it into my picture. Unfortunately the clouds were not the greatest but they still supplied the sky with some color during the sunset. One of my favorite parts about the photo while I was setting up my tripod, were the reflection in the water of the lights that were along the pier. I always love reflections in water and find that a brings a new level of interestingness to photos. I shot this photo with 3 exposures in order to get the full range of light and I masked through the appropriate parts in order to bring out shadows and blown out areas. For post-processing in Photoshop CS6 I had simply did some color corrections for the sky and brought out the reflections of the lights that are reflecting off the water a bit more. It didn’t take long to edit this photo since it is fairly minimal.
