This was my first time exploring this section of Whiskey Creek, which provides easy access to a nice tidal mangrove estuary. I scoped it out in midday, to get to know the location before trying for photographs which may require trekking in darkness. While softer light would be nice, the deep blues of midday were beautiful too. And I suspect I'd see more wildlife around dusk or dawn, but I saw tons of wildlife in midday as well. There were baby barracuda, hawks, and many puffer fish. Butterflies everywhere. Someone I met said he often sees spotted eagle rays, tarpon, and snook, though I have yet to see any of those. While taking this photograph, two blue crabs fought for position right at my feet, so close that I worried I'd get a collateral pinch. If you look closely, you can see the winner in the photo!

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In the ocean, a great many animals do not care for their young, but rather lay many eggs so that some make it to adulthood. For these newborns on their own, finding a safe place to hide can be the difference between life and death. Unfortunately, there's not many places to hide in the vast and empty sea. But there's a few. Coral reefs are one, with all their rocks and holes. The mangrove coast is another (pictured here at low tide, but usually the roots are underwater). Big predators have trouble navigating the mess of roots, so smaller animals are safe if they stay within. There's not all that many mangroves in the world, being limited mainly to between the latitudes of 25N and 25S. (Although the ones pictured here, in Broward County's Von D. Mizell-Eula Johnson State Park, are at 26N). Despite being at great risk, coral reefs cover about 110,000 square miles worldwide. Mangrove forests, on the other hand, cover only about 53,000. As such, mangrove forests are precious resources. Even this small slice of mangroves is a rich haven for young animals who will spend their adulthood thousands of miles away.

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Whiskey Creek is a beautiful tidal estuary, flanked with mangrove forest on one side and sand dune on the other. I usually like for my captions to be mainly write-ups of the area's nature, but this one will be different. I was offered a free copy of some photo editing software if I gave it an honest review on my website, and this is the photograph I chose to test it out. The software is called "sleeklens" (https://sleeklens.com/), and it is a suite of actions that plug into Photoshop.

First of all, I think some of the actions did not work on my 10 year old version of Photoshop (CS2). They give the error "The command 'Camera Raw Filter' is not available." But the majority of actions do not throw this error. And even the ones that do seem to retain most of their functionality. All in all, sleeklens has quite a few actions that I found useful, and it will definitely play a role in my future workflow.

I consider myself a fairly advanced Photoshop user. I tend to edit my photographs very thoroughly and manually, with many layer masks, channels, adjustment layers, etc. Sometimes I can spend almost a whole day editing a difficult photo. Many of the sleeklens actions seem designed to be used as quick and easy replacement for the techniques I've learned over the years. While they do perform well, most don't give me the flexibility and customization that I'm accustomed to when I do it myself. As one example, the "Dreamy Landscape" option seems to mimic the Orton effect, but doesn't do as well as when you control the effect yourself. I usually like to apply different radii of Gaussian blur for each layer independently, and adjust the transparency differently for each blending mode. Orton effect can improve a photo, but it can become overkill very easily, and I'm not sure a one-size-fits-all approach works best.

That being said, there are other actions that I did find quite useful. Some of the other techniques I use do lend themselves to automation, and sleeklens did a good job of doing just that. After preparing the photo in Adobe Camera Raw, I imported it into Photoshop. From there, after playing around with many actions, I settled on the following: I duplicated the photograph, and applied the "sky enhancer" action to one layer, and the "split tone" action to another. Using masks, I used kept the "split tone" layer for the trees, and left the "sky enhancer" layer for the rest. I then used the "deep blue sky" action, which was a bit overkill, but reduced it to 25% opacity and it gave a nice pop to the sky. After that, I just fine-tuned the saturation and contrast in each zone, and that was it. All in all, I'm satisfied with the post processing of this photograph, and sleeklens definitely helped speed up the process quite a bit. It will find its way into my workflow on future photographs for sure!

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I spend most of my time in North Carolina up in the Appalachian Mountains. I haven't been to the Outer Banks on the coast many times, only a couple recreational visits with friends. Even so, in addition to visiting the landmarks, I also tried to get a feel for the nature. It was very reminiscent to that of South Florida, but with slightly different flora and fauna. As the barrier island breaks up the ocean waves, the sound between the island and the mainland is much calmer. This makes it an important estuary and nursery ecosystem, for many types of young animals. In South Florida, a landscape like this would be full of mangroves. But up further north, in the Outer Banks, the winters are too cold for mangroves, so instead the coastal estuary is full of reeds and grasses. However, the feeling of wading in the warm shallow water, with minnows and crabs swarming around your feet, was similar.

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