South Padre Island Day 2

(Click on the photos to enlarge)
This one is from after 5pm on the first full day there.
Any earlier and the sun is too high, too bright, and too damn hot.
I first thought this was complete junk until I adjusted the levels in Photoshop.
Now I can live with it.

Here, I returned to the location of a previous favorite from May's trip, with two important differences.
There were no lovebirds watching this
sunset who would be annoyed by me popping a flash towards them, and I had as much time as I felt like taking. Instead of a couple of quick shots, I planned ahead for the luxury of refining my exposure and composition for 30 minutes. The light changes constantly and dramatically before and after sunset, so it was fun to capture this while experimenting.

(Here is where another photo from this series would go if I weren't saving it for something....y'all will see it soon)

This photo marks a departure for me.
While I own a good assortment of filters that screw-on to the end of my lens for special situations, I rarely use any besides a circular polarizer. (In fact, my CP was probably on the camera more than it was off it during this trip.)

To get the look I wanted for this shot, I added two ND4 neutral density filters.
These reduce the amount of light entering the lens, so to bring the exposure back to where I wanted it the shutter had to be open for a much longer duration, resulting in the smoothness of the water you see here. Waves and ripples average-out during long exposures giving an eerie calmness to moving water, but waiting until it got darker would have cost me the colors.