Morning at Omana

Morning at Omana, originally uploaded by nzcjs.

Boxing Day in New Zealand; I still can't get used to having it warm and sunny at Christmas after years of being cold and wet back in the UK. I'm not complaining you understand, it's just that it doesn't really feel like Christmas to me.

A morning walk took us to one of South Auckland's beaches. The sun was quite harsh and very bright. As you can see from the shot above most of the colour seems to have been bleached out of the image. The images in the post are unprocessed ... just a bit of a crop.

It was surprisingly quiet and peaceful; I suspect a lot of people headed to the malls to take advantage of the Boxing Day sales. I have to say, I was delighted they did as the morning walk was quite lovely.  Heading along the coast past Maraetai we came to Duder's Beach from where we could see the Coromandel Penninsular in the distance and some cormorants drying their wings closer to shore.

I was a little concerned about the images so took several at 1 stop intervals to process in Photomatix Pro as HDR images. To have a squiz at a couple of these check here and here.  I quite like the flare in the second of these two images as it seems to point to the boy on the beach; almost a sci-fi type feel to things!  Let me know what you think.