In the town of Hoorn, Holland, lies this truly quaint and photogenic harbor. Sitting at the edge of the seawall, and with my camera and 16–35mm lens on a tripod, I fired off several exposures of this calm and tranquil scene. Do you see the fine print in the first photograph? In the middle of the image, one of the boat’s main sails merges with the very old brick lighthouse. By making a very subtle shift to the left, I erased the merger for the second image. Then, in the tradition of practicing what I preach (“When is the best time to shoot a horizontal?”), right after shooting the vertical I rotated the camera for the third image.

By the way, I am fully aware of the contrails in the sky in all three images. Why didn’t I take out the healing brush and “fix” the sky in Photoshop so it was clear blue? Maybe I like contrails! Honestly, they don’t bother me. In my opinion, the only way to eliminate them would have been to come back to this same scene on a cloudy day and use a 3-stop graduated ND filter, tweaking the in-camera exposure by shooting at about -1 stop. That way, you would end up with a truly dramatic, dark sky and no contrails.

All images: Nikon D3X with 16–35mm lens, f/11 for 1/250 sec., ISO 100