Honaunau Lava

Thanks everyone for your comments and suggestions!

@Ed_Lowe, thank you for the suggestion. I am undecided if I like it better. I was trying to emphasize the patterns of the lava in my version, so I went with the 16 x 10 aspect ratio.

The only minor suggestion I have would be to burn down (or paint color and low-opacity layer) that little area along the bottom right edge. The lava is a little lighter there and pulls the eye just a bit. Another minor observation.

@Lon_Overacker Thanks for the suggestion, I will try this.

There is quite a bit of lens distortion – a fact of life with wide angles. The horizon should be flat if the camera is aimed level – i.e. the horizon cuts through the center point and the body is level. Strangely you are pretty close to that, and it actually looks a little less pronounced in the raw file. It took going to +16 with the distortion slider in Lens Correction to get the bow out of the horizon, then a rotation of about 1 deg CCW. Tricky here because the hills rise on the left side so I was mostly eyeballing the right horizon.

@Diane_Miller Thanks for the input. Yes, there is a lot of distortion when shooting at 14mm focal length. I applied the lens correction built into ACR and also compared that with DxO Prime Raw 2. Similar, but not as much correction as you applied. Both corrected for vignetting. I’m OK with the minimal distortion that the software applied. As far as the leveling, it’s a tricky because the hills in the BG are not straight and there are not very many verticals or horizontals to use in the FG. The sand and a few of the trees were what I used for reference. I also used the virtual horizon when I shot this. I think the original is level.

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