On a drizzly evening I was lucky enough to catch a brief break in the clouds, shooting about an hour before sunset at Plemont Bay, Jersey.

The rain passed by, the blanket clouds began to clear a little, enough even to glimpse the sun for a few brief moments. And so I began shooting.

Exposure bracketing proved a welcome change to shooting the sunset without having to fiddle around with any neutral density filters, as I usually would. Not having to switch between different grades of filters as the light levels decrease and no having to make sure the filter is aligned with the horizon.

I took a series of exposure brackets and then hit the digital dark room.

Exposure at 0

Waves of Light - image 1 - student project

Exposure at -1

Waves of Light - image 2 - student project

Exposure at +1

Waves of Light - image 3 - student project

I started off by using one of the landscape presets in Aurora HDR that best suited the kind of look I was trying to achieve and from there altered, tweaked and experimented with the controls.

Once I'd ended up at an image that I was happy with, I created a preset of my own, which I then used when importing more images to Aurora, experimenting and altering settings as I saw for to get the best out of subsequent images.

In all I created 3 presets, all slight variations of one another, some with more or less detail, others with cooler and warmer hues and so on. Then it was just a case of smoothing out the particular rough edges of each particular image created.

Here are my favourite three images from the shoot:

Waves of Light - image 4 - student project

Waves of Light - image 5 - student project

Waves of Light - image 6 - student project

Darren Malzard

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