My intention was to capture some interesting foreground, something interesting in the middle together with sunset and vibrant sky. Unfortunately, most of the clouds dissapeared by the time of sunset and strong wind started to blow, so the windchill was somewhere around -18 Celsius.
My mistake (as always) was that I tried to improvise during the best light to capture more shots, so at the end, I am not super happy with any of compositions. I needed to crop and clone out a not very good looking feature (old radio station).
I will be happy for any constructive feedback.
Pertinent technical details or techniques:
(If this is a composite, etc. please be honest with your techniques to help others learn)
Stacked 2 exposures.
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Welcome, Stefan! Regardless of the composition, I believe you did quite well capturing and processing several elements of this scene. I really like how you handled the light on the snow, considering the bright sunlight striking it. Although you might not have appreciated the wind while taking this image, the snow blowing in that sunlight really improves the image for me. Besides the controlling the light on the snow, I’m liking the hue as well. Cloud color looks good as well. Additionally, you handled the sun-star very well. Well done!
I like what you were after in this image. For me the best part of the image was the middle ground and the background. So I cropped accordingly. I also felt that a morning light should be bluer so I adjusted the white balance. Even though you were shooting into the sun I felt that the shadows were a bit heavy so I raised the shadows below the horizon. The result was a square crop.
Thank you Igor, I highly appreciate your effort. Blue in the snow was something that I tried to mitigate, but I have to say that I like your results, also cropping the image offers interesting perspective.
Welcome, Stefan. A most striking and well done first image. I am liking the original post vs. Igor’s crops, but you can’t go wrong with any. I really like the wind-blown snow and the image is really well composed. Excellent.
Welcome to NPN Stefan! What a terrific and beautiful winter image and first post!
As Ken pointed out, great job on main elements including the snow, midground and sun star as well as the sky. Colors and processing look great to me - but there is always room for subtle changes and I like would Igor did with the color balance - as well as boosting the luminosity of the shadowed mid ground.
I also think his crops work, although I’m not sure losing all the snow is the best thing. I like the original comp.
Great work with this. We’ll look forward to more images and your participation.
Harley, Preston, Lon - thank you very much for your feedback.
I have to say I am very positively suprised by warm welcome from all of the people who visited this thread. I am also very grateful that you spent time reviewing the shot and for allfeedback and inputs provided to me. Thank you very much
You can brighten this scene a bit. I like to see now almost at the white point, and when you darken oranges and yellows like in this scene they can start to look more brown than golden. Brightening this up a bit will look nice! You don’t have to be so strict with the histogram when dealing with snow, especially when its being hit by direct sunlight.
Welcome, Stefan. I am also new to NPN and I think we are in a great place.
I like Igor’s square crop a lot. Hm, maybe a little more at the bottom but I think the brightening of the directly lit snow patch has added a lot to the scene.
