The photographer is looking for generalized feedback about the aesthetic and technical qualities of their image.
Description
As twilight approaches, the star-speckled blackness of night slowly fades to a delightful gradient of grayish blues. Nearly imperceptibly, the cool blue tones begin to warm into more pleasant tones. Have you ever noticed that there are often two sunrise events, well, three if you count the Belt of Venus to the West! Often, and especially if there are clouds far out of sight to the east, a deep red glow will appear very low on the horizon when that distant region is experiencing sunrise but your location is still under the shadow of the Earth. That red slowly fades to blueish gray before coming alive again with pinks and oranges as the Sun finally chases that shadow off to the West. This is to sunrise chasers what second breakfast is to a Hobbit! Here, in this photo, the Sun has been up for a bit, but the mountains to the east have blocked it from view. I caught its yellow glow the moment it cleared the ridge and poured its glorious light over the fog-shrouded Gallatin Valley.
Specific Feedback
Does it bother you that the Sun is centered left to right? I like the way the created subtle shadows that ray out from the trees a bit. I’ve processed this with a little more saturation that the previous one from the same morning. The Sun was just enough lower to cast more orange, but the scene as I have presented is darker than reality.
Technical Details
Nikon D850
Nikon 70-300mm f/4.5-5.6
ISO 64, f/10, 1/1250th, 300mm
I used these settings in an attempt to more properly expose the sun. With thin clouds and ground fog, it was really bright, and indistinct. I processed this twice in Lightroom. The first screen shot shows the initial settings.
was a bit of noise from under-exposing the foreground, so I ran Lightroom’s Denoise program and then made a few other changes, shown in the second screen shot.
Hi Paul,
This image is flat out gorgeous! I love the atmospherics with the ground fog as well as the contrasting warm and cool tones in the scene. Your description of the sunrise sounds very much like what happens in the White Mountains of NH as the actual sunrise has already taken place, but the mountains are blocking it from your view. Your placement of the sun looks just fine to me. Beautifully done.
Wonderful scene!! I wasn’t there but it feels like there is some disconnect between the intense color of the sky, with the sun that high, and the fog-shrouded valley.
Paul I just love this photo: simple composition, the contrasts very low, plenty of light with the glow of the sun very well controlled. The row of trees horizontal and well separated increases the sense of peace and stillness of the scene. The light shadows and contrasts make a pictorial feeling and pastel colors. I love the photo as it is.
I think this might be even better than your last post. I’m loving those center cut trees and the fog that’s shrouding them. The layers, once again, are fantastic. The foreground has beautiful soft, almost magenta (very slight) light which I love just like your last image but the sky seems a bit warmer and as @Diane_Miller states, a bit more disconnected with the foreground than it should be. Thoughts…maybe add a touch of magenta tint to the sky or lower the intensity of the warmth in the sky or both. It’s a tiny nit and of little significance but it’s all I could come up with. Like I said at the outset, terrific image.
@Ed_Lowe@Giuseppe_Guadagno@Diane_Miller@David_Haynes Thanks for the kind comments everyone. Diane, you and David were on to something. It’s especially noticeable when viewed on a small screen that saturates the colors more. I tweaked the sky and foreground to match up better and definitely like it better. I added it to the top.
Excellent!! Odd how much difference a small tweak can make. And if ti were my image I wonder if I’d have noticed it. I think I would have accepted what I got without a close look. But this is probably a case where if you put it away for a while and come back, then you see it.
Thanks Diane. You’re right about that! I go back to images years later and find glaring errors in images I was so proud of! Another interesting thing about this image is that the sun is probably not as high as you think that it is. The long focal length makes the mountain look taller than it is. It’s probably 12 miles away and I was on a fairly high hilly area looking over a valley. It was 54 minutes after official sunrise time, but in the winter, the Beartooth Plateau really delays how soon we see the sun!
