Cascade Lake and Lake Tahoe

This pano is a stitch of several shots. I shot this around sundown from just off the edge of Highway 89 on a narrow ridge where the road runs between Cascade lake and Emerald Bay at Tahoe. Emerald Bay is on the other side of the road immediately behind me. In this image, Cascade lake is on the right and at a higher elevation than Lake Tahoe which in on the left.

What technical feedback would you like if any? Any and all.

What artistic feedback would you like if any? Any and all.

Pertinent technical details or techniques:

(If this is a composite, etc. please be honest with your techniques to help others learn)

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Greg, I hope to see more of your images. This vantage point of the two lakes is one that I have not seen. I enjoy the trees forming a border around the scene, but not at the edges, which would be severe. Nice composition.
For tweaks,

  • as this is sunset, warm the temperature to your liking. Don’t just take what the stacking software offers you.
  • Shoooore is a lot of gravel on left and right corners. Apply some perspective correction to be rid of a bunch of that.
  • if you think the contrails are are a distraction, Heal them out
    The attachment is done with a tablet and Snapseed freeware, you can certainly improve on it w your software.

Hi Greg, this is quite a scene. Certainly worthy of a shot and pano. I feel that this is a pretty accurate representation of the light conditions at the time. I like the slight red glow on teh trees

Few things that hit me and thought I would comment on. I think you composition in general is quite good. I like the way the scene is framed by the ground and the trees on the right. I do find the trees that are cut off (especially the furthest left one) to be quite distracting to the eye and also detract from the res of the image. I would consider cropping in from the left to remove the main bulk of the tree and then clone the remianing braches out the sky. For the tree in the middle you could either try restiching the image and see if you gain some more space or artificially add some more sky in PS by expanding the canvas.

Regarding the stiching. I would play around with some of the other methods of projecting to see if you can remove some of the foreground distortion. May also help flatten out the gravel areas and give a more realistic perspective.

There are a few recurring dust sopts in the shot that I would remove. Especially evident when you open the image up.

I think the processing is pretty fine too. Only observation is that the frame between the green lines (see below) appears to be draker than the frames surrounding it. This could be from capture where the exposure jumped slightly or localised adjustemnts gone a bit heavy.

I would also remove the arcing contrail.

I have illustrated an image below to show what Im talking about with these point.

Cheers,
Eugene