Motivated by @John_Williams’s last image, I revisited this image from a backpacking trip in the Sierra a few years ago. Cloudless sky is pretty much the default condition here and if it’s not for the love of the outdoors, I would have already gone nuts. I usually end up chucking the photos from those days into places to revisit. John’s image has made me think about putting some real efforts into processing them. Let me know what you think about this one. As always, all comments, critiques, and feedbacks are most welcome.
2 images blended, Nikon D750, 17mm, f/11, ISO 400, 90 secs for the ground, and 2.5 secs for the sky.
Perfect choice to do two exposures – it’s hard to see at the time how bright a sky is against shaded ground. Th gradient in the sky gives it an understated elegance that is interesting enough. I’m wondering about a little more contrast in the land, and maybe a slight CCW rotation. It’s hard to tell but many of the trees seem to be leaning a bit. But maybe it’s just the FG one. You have had some wonderful trips in the mountains!
@Diane_Miller, immediately after posting this, I realize the leaning trees in the BG too. The lonely one in the FG leans too much to correct but I thought I could correct the ones in the BG as much as I can. I amended the original so you can click through it and compare. Let me know what you think.
Much better! That FG tree is obviously dancing to a different drummer. A further fix would be to do a distort and pull the LL corner in a little and the UL out a little. It would involve some crop, or possibly some content-aware fill. It would cause the BG trees on the left to lean a bit but they are not as noticeable and a visually pleasing compromise could be interesting to explore.
But then I found a way to click between the two versions and that looks like what you did. Maybe a tiny bit more?
Thanks, @Diane_Miller! Yeah, a tiny bit more, for sure. There is so much room to play here. I hope I am not beating a dead horse, I just added (hopefully) the last revision which makes the foreground tree more vertical.
Adhika, this one is not particularly working for me. I like the light and the blue mood, but I find the composition funneling me toward the grove of trees lower right, not really where I want to be. I like the foreground pattern and light and I like the changes with the tree, but…
@Steve_Kennedy, Don White, and I were back at it again last week, and blessed with blue skies for entire time we were at Mt. Rainier; it made for some interesting photography.
I think the blue hour makes this plain sky work well Adhika. It gives it a dawn feel, and the contrast of light in the sky adds to that. I don’t think the blue sky hurts here, and even adds. I like your final version the best, but agree with Harley that the eye doesn’t flow quite as smoothly with this one.
