I walked by the place where I took this photo just recently, and it got me thinking about Winter Gold.
This is a photograph that I very much love. It's just on the beach, heading right into the Atlantic Ocean. There was nothing special about the day I took it, a rather ordinary day in February, except that I'd just gotten my Canon to replace my Pentax as my main camera and I went for a walk to test it out. Winter Gold was one of the pictures I shot in that very first shoot with my new camera. I thought it was a good omen. I like it paired with this other shot, Paved Beauty, so called because it shows a little bit of the parking lot adjacent to the beach.
After I took it, I went back to my computer and used Lightroom to open up the raw files. I shoot in raw and jpeg, but I mostly use the raw files. It's nice to have jpeg if I need to get a shot to someone in a hurry, I can just send them the file right from my camera, but for most of the photos I edit and sell, I worked with the larger raw file, not the jpeg. Anyway in post processing, I changed a grey day into something really special, using Lightroom presets and textures in photoshop. Before these pictures, I hadn't really known how much of a difference textures could make, how beautifully they could elevate a picture. Silly me for not understanding, but now textures are some of my favorite tools.
I remember cheering when I finally got to the end image in Winter Gold. It felt so perfect when I finally got it to that point - it was just a revelation on my part. It was some work with balancing the colors with the texture and then making sure it all worked together, but it was worth all the tweaking it took.
I will always really like these photographs together. They are like continuing a story in my mind, but each stands on its own.
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