The Waikato River is the longest river in New Zealand. But being NZ it’s not that long really, only 475km. It starts on the slopes of Mt Ruapehu (an active volcano, located pretty much in the centre of the North Island), goes via Lake Taupo and finally drains into the Tasman Sea at Port Waikato. This picture is taken just a couple of miles from Port Waikato where the river is about 1km wide.

Waikato River - click to enlarge

This shot is looking up the river, away from it’s mouth. It uses the normal “3-exposure Photmatix” to create an HDR, then it’s been post-processed in Photoshop using Topaz and some more Luminosity and Saturation masking.

Here is another shot taken the same day, looking the other direction, towards the sea (which is just behind those hills in the background).

Waikato River near Port Waikato - click to enlarge

This uses more naturalistic processing. The idea is to make it look like a regular photo, not an HDR. This required quite a bit of playing around to get it to look right. Some examples : the clouds were too blue, so their saturation had to be reduced. The beach was too dark and needed to be lightened. And so on.