Loxahachee Everglades with the Fuji X-T2

Today I made my first, brief trip to visit the Florida Everglades. I plan to do a number of special photography trips through the Everglades and Florida Keys including some aerials. Today's mission was just a brief foray into a local section called Loxahachee. I had several lenses and both my X-T2 and X-Pro2 with me, but for the photos below I used only the X-T2 and the 18-135mm zoom. One of the things I wanted to show was the relationship of the weather to the Everglades.

During the summer it is extremely hot and thunderstorms pass through the area almost daily making for some interesting cloud formations against a deep blue sky. I was shooting both RAW and jpg at the same time, as I always do, and had the camera set for Acros with a red filter to add drama to the sky by darkening the blues. I also shot to darken the shadows and increase the highlights. The results of the jpg files were still not dramatic enough so I processed the RAW files in Photoshop to enhance the images further. I began by using the same Acros with red filter profile in Adobe Camera RAW, but deepened the blues even more because I wanted the sky to go almost black in its darkest places.

I had considered adding a polarizing filter to darken the sky further, but that would have also killed the reflections on the water so in the end I voted against it.