You knew this was coming

… because it’s the month’s end, of course.

surreal high contrast sunrise colors on North Topsail Beach
And naturally I had to use another shot from the trip – I’ll probably be finding excuses for that for a while yet.

It’s easy to believe this one has been altered, but not really – this is how it came from the camera. Like I said earlier, I had contrast and saturation boosted a little to enhance the colors, but no more than these, for instance. And I had adjusted exposure compensation down 2/3 of a stop, except not really – this camera tends to over-expose a little in my opinion, so ‘default’ setting for me is underexposed by 1/3 stop, so this is, again, a minor change. Most of what this comes from is simply getting the exposure reading from the bright sky, which the camera tried to render down more into a middle tone, and that had the greatest influence on what you see here. The orange only went a little way up into the sky, which the wet sand caught at its flattest angle, but the rest of the sky was pre-dawn indigo, reflected by the sand at the bottom of the pic and by the majority of the ocean; thus the notable contrast. Either by themselves you could accept easily as natural conditions, but both together seem to stretch plausibility, don’t they? It’s rare that you can use a straightforward landscape shot as an abstract, so I’m happy with it.