A lot of new things going on in this image which I made last weekend. First, this is a part of Garrapata Beach I've never photographed and hence a composition I've never attempted. I made this at around 7 AM with a low tide of -1.6ft happening just half an hour prior. The patterns in the sand with the wave washing out along with the seaweed instantly caught my eye and I knew there was an interesting photograph to be made here. This was actually a test exposure and I knew the sky would be blown out (sunrise had happened 75 minutes ago). I did take several other exposures to preserve the sky and cloud detail (and will edit and share a color version some day), but when I saw this image in Capture One, I felt it could be a striking black & white with just a hint of clouds visible.
The other new thing is the post processing. Like all Phase One files, I started off in Capture One, but then I did the black & white conversion in Silver Efex Pro, part of the newly updated Nik Collection 3.0. I don't use plugins that often, but with Nik 3.0's ability to edit non-destructively in TIF files I had to give it try. Finally, the image was finished in Lightroom. This way I could each tool for things that I like best about them and good chunk of the workflow remains non-destructive.
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