An excerpt from a post a few weeks back:

Last night: My old motto – if you post the good photos, slave like hell over the bad but don’t post them then you are perhaps doing yourself a disservice.

The photos below nearly killed me. I even ventured back to an HDR automated programme (eek!!) to see if it could blend the photos of the pier where I was struggling to do it manually. The programme also failed. After four separate blends (manual & auto) I gave up on the pier. Eventually I used one RAW image and applied a few effects that generated some lovely halos (photos should not have halos). The Hitachi photo ended-up with a third of no thirds and although I really liked both shots, either my capture of them or processing will have to stand down for another day. The F-stop on the machine is low and the DOF is thus lacking.

As fate would have it, I bought myself a bottle of Tullamore Dew 12 year old Irish whiskey today and have had a few to calm my post-processing blues .

This morning – I removed some halos on the pier and fiddled the contrast after getting some late night motivation from Henry J Starbuck, Tammi Harding, Alwyn J Mouton, Elmer van Zyl, Mike Brookes, Joanne Gouveia and Elmo Jones to go round 6.

PS – the guard at Virginia Beach says no other photographers have visited. I would encourage you to go there soon as the pier I’m under is only temporary – it’s being used as a ramp to build the culvert on the left.