How I Made “Sunset on the Columbia River “

I’m usually not a landscape photographer but when I came across this scene when Jasmine and I were walking in Hood River, Oregon I couldn’t resist. Since I always have a camera with me I shot this with the Panasonic Lumix GX7 and the Lumix 12-32mm lens at ISO 200. I love this camera/lens combination since it’s light and easy to carry.

Because of the extreme difference in lighting from the sky to the sailboat I thought it might have to be an HDR so I took five images one f-stop apart. When I got home and looked at the exposures in Lightroom I decided to see if I could use a single image. I choose the -1 stop exposure since it had the most detail in the highlights. I used the Highlight and Shadow sliders in Lightroom 5 to bring out detail in the sailboat and mountains. I then opened the image in Photoshop CS5 and did some selective dodging and burning on the sailboat and mountains on the right and water.—Mark Toal