Marin Headlands, photo by Harold Davis. View this image larger.

On a bright, blustery winter day I wandered the Marin Headlands with photographer and friend Steven C. It’s amazing how close this beautiful area is to downtown San Francisco. This shot is looking towards the opening to Tennessee Beach from the ocean side (you can’t see the beach itself).

This was a day of extraordinarily heavy surf, and I spent most of my time photographing the explosive action of the waves—as close to the action as I felt safe. But I couldn’t resist an overall shot of the spectacular landscape, captured in full, living RAW color, multi-RAW processed to extend the dynamic range, then converted to black and white using a layer stack of Photoshop adjustment layers, primarily the Red Filter preset and the Infrared preset (for the sky).

In other words, the photo is a sort of non-HDR HDR created by hand—meaning that the tonal and dynamic ranges are greater than you would normally get from a single capture, rendered in black & white, and without the garish look so common in HDR photography.