I took this image on a perfectly misty morning on the way to work. Thankfully, it was one of the days I wasn’t rushing to drop our daughter off at school, so I had some spare time to stop and enjoy the sunset. With just the right amount of fog with essentially no clouds, the whole river valley below where we live became effervescent and glowed as the sun peeked above the tree line. Thanks in advance for any feedback!
What technical feedback would you like if any?
Any feedback is welcome. In particular, does the processing of the lighter area between the trees in the mid ground and those further back seem too light? There wasn’t much definition–it was a solid bank of fog–but I did bring down the highlights some in that area. Is it enough? Not enough?
What artistic feedback would you like if any?
Any feedback on composition, color, etc is welcomed. Thoughts on leaving that amount of the sky?
Pertinent technical details or techniques:
(If this is a composite, etc. please be honest with your techniques to help others learn)
Two shot pano in the vertical orientation to make it ~4x5 aspect and increase the pixels I had to work with. Fuji X-T2 with the 55-200 mm at 140 mm. 1/125 sec at f/13. Basic stitching, cropping, and white balance in Lightroom. In photoshop, I added a little contrast with a curve to the foggy area in the middle. Used a curve and TK actions to add some midtown contrast to the foreground grass and the trees in the mid ground. Then some dodging to the lighter areas in the trees and burn down the ridge line and mid-ground tree silhouettes some. Slight freehand vignette at the top and bottom.
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It’s a lovely low contrast misty scene, I think this looks good as presented. But I would also like it when the mist in mg/left was a bit brighter to give the light some more direction.
The sky doesn’t add too much, so cropping some of it might indeed be an option. You could play with cropping some of the fg too, up to the first shadows on the grasses? But the image will go more towards a square one, don’t know if that’s what you wanted.
It is good as presented, but I think cropping the entire sky to just below the ridge line further emphasizes the wonderful foggy light and the main scene, the trees and grass. That does create a square image, however. I would not crop from the bottom.
I second @Jim_Gavin’s and @Michael_Lowe’s suggestions. The resulting image is almost square and I think I would resample it and change the aspect ratio, to make it exactly square.
Adam, the warmth and touch of mystery look great here. The light on the foreground grasses looks good and the brightness of the mid-ground area fits the scene (although a bit of burning on the right might also work well). While I could see cropping about half of the sky, that does leave you with shape that’s hard to print.
Thank you all for your thoughts. I have the image framed in landscape and will edit that file to see if. I can get a version that has less sky but in a more easily printable aspect ratio. Cheers
