There is a lot at work in this photo (behind-the-scenes) that I find fascinating.

#1: I find it truly spectacular that the left half of the photo has almost zero color and the right half has so much it’s almost over saturated with color.  That is not a product of editing; that is a product of shooting directly into the sun and having the sun’s powerful rays blast the color out of everything on the left side.

#2: This is probably the best example I have of a photo that follows the slightly unusual way that I shoot. When I shoot, I always manually set my camera’s settings.  And I do this so that I can ensure that the brightest part of my photo will always have texture.  This means that the rest of the picture might be very dark or shadowy.  But I don’t worry about that because I can fix that in post.  So if you saw this photo on my camera, you’d ask why I’d taken a picture of a beach at night and then why I didn’t adjust the settings to make it lighter.  Well, had I shot this photo so that people could easily see the ground and water in the unedited version, the sky would be nothing more than a white blob.  Here’s the original, unedited version of the picture.