Blue Skies Smiling At Me

It took a little bit longer than I had planned, but I got my blue sky.  It was almost two weeks ago that I posted a similar photograph of the Jacques Cartier Bridge, but with a red sky.  For those of you who may have missed it, you can find that post here.  In between then and now, we had almost an entire week of rain and then a good four day stretch of high humidity that quickly reminded me of why I'm a winter person.  I pretty much followed the same method as last time.  Went back to the same spot, used the same lens, though cleaned thoroughly before leaving, and sucked on the same flavour of Lifesaver.  There was one difference.  Getting a little bored while the sun took its sweet time to set, I began to play around by taking shots of the above scene, but with different exposure times.  The goal was to try my hand at something called HDR (High Dynamic Range) Photography.  Simply put, HDR photography consists of taking those different photographs and putting them together allowing to capture a greater range between the lightest and darkest images of a photograph.  However, fate would get in my way as upon returning home, I opened up Photoshop to try out the little trick only to discover that my version doesn't have the HDR tool.  Yes, my version of Photoshop really is that old.  There is a way to get the same result without the tool, but I need to get a little more in touch with my inner Photoshopper before I go down that path.  So, with that little balloon being temporarily burst, I went back to the job at hand, creating my blue sky.  Sadly, I once again fell victim to the little dust spots that hampered my previous outing.  Unlike the last time, I have no real answer as to why.  The lens never left my camera and was cleaned before I left by yours truly.  As I took more pictures, more spots appeared.  Surprisingly, this shot that I used only had three spots, which were easy enough to get rid of using the Clone Tool in Photoshop.  I also used the Colour Balance tool to add a bit of blue to the sky and just a little nudge in Levels.  The shot itself was taken at f/9, 4sec, ISO 100 at 300mm and once again cropped to 12.5" x 4".  Wow, that ended up being a lot of words for a photograph that pretty much only has a different colour sky than the last one.