I went to a car show that is held every Sunday morning called Coffee & Cars. It's a place where a lot of regular folks can bring their cars and show them off and visit with a bunch of other people that like to do the same thing. It's a great place to make pictures of cars of all vintages and makes. Some are restored to look like the day they came off the assembly line and others are customized to the imagination of its owner. Then there are cars like the one above which has seen better days. I'm sure this car will one day be restored but I kind of liked it in this weathered condition. For this photo I adjusted the contrast using Topaz Adjust to bring out more detail in the old paint and rust.
I went over to Laguna last weekend hoping for a nice cloudy sunset only to find a few scattered clouds in the sky. This made for an OK sunset opportunity, but nothing too exciting. I did set up this shot about a half hour before the sun went down that I liked. Having a prominent foreground subject always seems to make for an interesting photograph. This is an HDR photo using 3 exposures (+2,0, -2). I also used NIK's Color Efex Pro Tonal Contrast filter.
Here's a shot taken at Dana Point Harbor of a line of sailboats. I liked the repetition pattern of the boats themselves but also of the reflections of the boats. This was a single shot processed using Topaz Adjust and a little tweaking in Photoshop.
This is one of the few lighthouses in Southern California and in my opinion one of the most picturesque. This was taken in the late afternoon about 2 hours before sunset and the lighting was still a bit contrasty. To help deal with the contrast, I decided to process this one in NIK's Silver Efex Pro to convert it to b&w. I finished it off with a bit of white vignetting. I like the old fashioned look it gave to this scene. It looks to me like a photo taken back in the 50's.
