Picture of the Day - 2/15/2010

This morning, I spent some time on the northeast shore of Lake Tahoe just past Sand Harbor State Park. The water is so clear and deep blue! I managed to find a trail down to near the shore through packed snow. Due to the lateness of the day, this was a pretty tough shot to expose properly - especially, since I was shooting into the sun. Digital (and film) capture can't quite record the extreme dynamic range between light and dark, so the sky was a little blown out and the shadowed areas, too dark. This was quickly resolved in Photoshop Lightroom, one of my favorite editing programs. Since I was shooting RAW, a simple adjustment of the Exposure corrected the sky and an increase in Fill Light opened up the shadows. The dust spot tool removed a couple specks from the sky, and I was finished! It took all of 30 seconds to fix everything. If I had captured this in JPEG mode, it would not have been possible to fix the blown out sky.