I shot this during mid-afternoon earlier this summer. I’m open to feedback on any aspect. But I’m most curious to hear about: how you think it works as an overall composition (i.e. is it interesting and pleasing, does it draw you in and keep you in), whether you find the balance of tones and colors to be effective.
A little more detail - I had soft but somewhat directional light on the foreground thanks to variable cloud cover, and mixed clouds and sun in the distance, which I thought make for a more interesting scene than the typical mid-day vista. However, this yielded much higher contrast in the background than the foreground, so after focus stacking processing (I had 6 shots focused progressively into the scene, and I stacked in Helicon with DNG output) I “double processed” in Lightroom (i.e. created a virtual copy, and raw processed one to optimize for foreground tones and the other for background, and then blended the two in Photoshop).
What a delightful scene! It certainly grabs my attention and holds it. Your composition is well done and leads my eye throughout the entire image. I think you nailed the processing. And I can’t think of anything I would change.
It’s a beautiful composition! I do think the flowers in the foreground are too bright compared to the rest of the scene; my eye gets stuck there and there aren’t enough leading lines to help draw me to the amazing vista in the background. I’d likely drop the highlights a bit in the flowers and use some dodging on the mid-ground trees to bring them up a hair.
It’s a tough one to balance given the time of day but I think if you can pull back on the foreground a touch and use the white flowers to lead the eye to the lone pine in the middle, that creates almost an s-curve leading the eye back to the valley and mountains beyond. I’d also brighten up the boulders on the left a touch.
Edit: Quick tweaks. Red areas were brightened, blue was darkened. I also decided to try a 4x5 crop to see if that helps balance the foreground and background a little better. I think it may.
Just a wonderful composition. A perfect foreground leading to midground and finally the mountains. Because of the lead in, there’s no competition between flowers and mountain. It all flows seemlessly. Although a faint distant mountain may be more natural the original rendering looks very appealing to me. Actually the mountain already has a bluish haze that’s associated with distance.
Jim, I think you did very well with your processing. I like the emphasis on the foreground flowers even as you show the full location. The sky and clouds also look very good.
Jim,
This is a grand view for sure. The flowers make for a wonderful lead in to the scene and the light on the BG mountains is gorgeous as are the clouds. I could see lighting up the white flowers just a touch as well as the mid ground just to bring the tonal values closer together. I do wish that solitary tree was not there in the middle, but there obviously was nothing you could do about that. This has a very refreshing mood to it that is appealing. Beautifully done.
What an engaging and lovely alpine scene. I love the sense of depth created by your composition, and your processing does a nice job of capturing the light at this time of day.
Ditto Youssef’s and other’s consensus - this is a beautiful mountain landscape. The near/far comp works perfectly and I particularly like the complimentary sky/clouds and the wildflowers aren’t to shabby either… Well done!
Thanks to all for the positive and constructive feedback - this is both affirming and also good food for thought as I finish up prepping this image for a finished print.
Well done!