Bremerton Ferry

We've had a gorgeous run of beautiful weather during the day - and  an unbelievable full moon at night.  There's a string of houses along Point White that all have  gorgeous waterfront views of Mt. Rainier, and only one spot along the road where a photographer can peep in between the hedges. This is it.

I played around with a few Lightroom adjustments, with varying degrees of satisfaction. Most importantly, the entire sky was washed out, particularly at the exposure settings I was using (1/2000 sec at f/7/1, ISO 1000 on a 300m F4 lens and D700 body). So I used the Graduated Filter to burn the sky slightly and also to add some color back in. The saturation level of the color filter was 56% but would probably look more natural around 35%.

I also did a color dodge of light green on the trees on the left side, to bring up the color.  I darkened one of the houses in the forest on the right side - mainly because when I was looking at the view, my eye was drawn to the ferry, the mountain, and the trees on that point in the foreground - not on the houses along that point. I also pushed highlights to +86, to pull out the detail of the glaciers on the mountain. Again, this was because of the flat light which my camera saw but my eye did not.

Ok what the heck, here's the original:

And here's what I would call a "purist's compromise":