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This was my first time shooting the Santa Monica Pier on my Canon 5Dmkii. It’s a very popular spot for photographers, but it’s rare to get the timing of the lights right.
If you plan on going here to shoot the amusement park on the pier, the best time I’ve found is after the sun goes down. Unless, of course, there is an amazing sunset, which only occurs a few times a year in Los Angeles. Most of the time, it looks like this.
The HDR Process
To get a photo like this to turn out the way it does it requires a technique known as HDR photography. It’s when a photographer takes a series of photos at different exposures (one to capture the highlights, one for the shadows, and one for the mid-tones). In this case, I used a program called Photomatix to combine them all together then Photoshop to touch everything up—nothing too difficult but time-consuming to get everything just right.
