Another beach I often visit is Burleigh on the Gold Coast. It has some interesting rock formations at either end of the beach, and is a fairly quiet beach if you are there early enough in the morning.

Recently I have been venturing out of my photographic ‘comfort zone’, playing around with some new ideas and techniques.

I have always avoided photo editing apart from simple stuff like cropping or removing dust specks,  mostly as I don’t really know what I am doing and I feel like any major editing would take aaaaages.

I was tempted though by the free 30 day Lightroom trial offered by Adobe, and decided to see if I could change my mind about photo editing. Another new addition to my camera gear has been a neutral density filter – I have dreams of getting beautiful blurred wave images and while I haven’t got there yet I am having a lot of fun with this filter!

I discovered this filter is also quite nice to use early in the morning for landscape photos, especially for creating that misty water effect.

Here is an image I took at Burleigh using the neutral density filter and a 25 second shutter release. I was very excited to see the beautiful misty water around the rocks.

While I found the above image very cool, I was interested to see what Lightroom could do to it. By adjusting a few different things (mostly the exposure ) I was able to create this image which I LOVE!

Here is another image of Burleigh beach also edited using Lightroom.

So my initial foray into the world of photo editing has made me realise that some images can be greatly enhanced and are worth spending a bit of extra time on, to create an image that I find reflects the magic of that moment when you took the original photo.

However, my general laziness towards photo-editing still exists, and I think I derive more joy from capturing an image that I find beautiful and exciting without needing to change it.

I have also ventured out of my comfort zone in regards to lens selection – I have been through a stage of being a little obsessed with the play of light and water reflecting on the sand at that time in the morning before the sun has risen. I found using my usual wide-angle lens wasn’t really capturing the golden glowing sand like I wanted. One morning I used my 60mm lens instead and suddenly the perspective changed and voila – a new way to view the ocean!