The #1 Paul McGehee Gallery in the World

No Trip to Ocean City would be complete without a visit to the Ocean Gallery. This is a fantastic building for photographers. Inside the building is a wide variety of art that acts as a great inspiration. Of course as you can see the outside is pretty special as well. You can go for the entire building as I have done here, or you can focus on bits of the building. I have photographed this building every year that I have been to Ocean City so far, and I am sure that I will continue to do so in the coming years. As I was making this photo a storm was blowing in. You can see it in the distance. I had already toured the inside of the gallery, but I did not get a chance to make some pictures outside that I wanted to. The good news is that there is always next year.

Editing This Photo in Lightroom 5 and Photomatix 5

This was another situation where I wanted to use HDR to show the scene the way that I saw it in person. I probably could have used a RAW file here, but I would have had some noise. By using three photos two stops apart I was able to get a much more detailed file to work with. This has become my go to way to deal with a scene that has a high dynamic range. I send the three photos from Lightroom into Photomatix 5 to process them. I normally would deghost the image, but I liked the way that it ghosted the patrons of the boardwalk here to blur the faces. Once the 32 bit HDR file is created I save it, and open it up inside of Lightroom again. I then edit this large file with the powerful sliders inside of Lightroom. I started out with the HDR Look preset by Matt Kloskowski, and then I tweaked the sliders from there to get the look that I wanted. I have been favoring punchy photos lately, and this one is no different.