You know the problem. You go to a beautiful, often photographed place, and start shooting. It’s fun. Your images look just like every image you’ve ever seen of the place. That part is frustrating. Question is: how do you make an iconic place your own? We recently spent several days at Cannon Beach in Oregon. The first image below is pretty straightforward. The weather was blustery – pretty typical for this time of year.

So I decided to try a couple of different things. Another day, better weather, lots of color with a strong foreground component.

Finally I decided to try fiddling with an image after the fact to make it look like it might have been shot years ago.

Same beach, same weekend, three different ways of feeling about it. Which do you think works best?