I've got some more shots that I'm going to post from my trip to Dubai, but I thought I'd put this one up first: taken this morning on Fleetwood beach. If you've seen my beachcombing gallery you'll know that I have quite a few shots of lost and abandoned items that I've found on that beach, but I think that this one has to be one of my all time favourites (though I'd be hard pressed to tell you why).

In terms of the post-production ...

This one was relatively straightforward, other than that I merged two exposures: the metered exposure, and a second shot that was over-exposed by 1 2/3 EV (I used this to bring out the detail in the darker areas of the umbrella).

I also used Topaz Detail, a Photoshop plugin from Topaz Labs, to bring out the fine scale detail in both the umbrella and the sand. If you haven't tried this plugin, I'd highly recommend it, as it does an absolutely superb job of bringing out the detail in an image without introducing any obvious processing artefacts.

If you're interested, I've posted some before and after shots of a crop from the high res' image here:

http://www.chromasia.com/iblog/archives/Untitled_0095.php

I don't often recommend plugins, not least because I much prefer working out how to achieve a particular within Photoshop, but none of the Photoshop techniques that I know (USM with a large radius, High Pass Sharpening, and so on) come close to those you can achieve with Topaz Detail. If you're interested, this is a topic I covered in my latest tutorial. Anyway, download the demo version and try it for yourself.