This was taken just before sunrise over the Catalina Mountains, which are north of Tucson. I’m looking almost due north for this comp, but the predawn light in this near-solstice image had a lot of nice light in this direction, not just in the east.
What technical feedback would you like if any?
I’m experimenting with exposure blending. Here there is one exposure for the mountains and another for the clouds. The exposures are one stop apart. Even though the respective exposures have the required information, I still find it takes a lot of effort to balance brightness and contrast to make it look natural. This is what I finally decided on, though there were about six alternate versions to get to this. Hope it looks more real than blended.
Any pertinent technical details:
Nikon D7600, 18-300mm lens @ 27mm
Exposure 1: f/13, 1/20 sec, ISO 400
Exposure 2: f/13, 1/40 sec, ISO 400
You may only download this image to demonstrate post-processing techniques.
Beautiful, Tony. The blending looks good to my eye as does the processing. The sky has a great dynamic feel, like I can see the clouds expanding, if that makes any sense. I like it a lot.
Awesome cloudscape with a nice anchor of peaks. Processing looks good to me as does the well balanced composition. Maybe take a touch of saturation out of the blues.
Thanks for that recommendation Dave Dillemuth. Just played with that and I think it’s a subtle improvement pulling back the blue saturation, especially in the ULC.
Pretty sweet…
Image conveys the movement well and the colors are terrific.
Very minor critique might be to lighten the dark clouds a bit.
The blues look good to me.
Tony, I like the composition here, the way you have arranged the clouds is very pleasing. The radial pattern of the clouds creates a sense of motion. And I like the way the colors in the sky are distributed into the 4 corners of the sky, and not as much in the center. In terms of the blend, I think the luminosity and contrast in the lower level gray clouds could be increased slightly. With the way the light is strongly hitting the higher altitude clouds, I would expect there would be more luminosity from bounce light on the lower clouds, and maybe even the mountains.
Tony, This is really nice! The composition looks great and that sky is beautiful. The blue saturation in the upper left sky has been mentioned so good to go. Nice work blending too even though I don’t know much about that I think it looks great.
Gorgeous sky! I agree that the peaks are nicely included - enough for a solid anchor, but not so much that they take away from the wonderful clouds.
Exposure blend looks great. Never would have guessed there was a blend.
I like the blues and the warm/cool contrasts in the sky. If anything, I’d back off the saturation in orange in the LRC; yeah realizing that’s getting closer to the source of the light, but that little corner pulls my eye a little. But honestly, that’s really getting picky…
One thing nobody brought up is that since the composition consists of mostly horizontal shapes/layers a more wider format could accentuate that for you.
I like this a lot Tony. The clouds and sky are dramatic and the mountains are nice anchor for the scene. Only suggestion would be to tone done the saturation of the clouds on the left and right edges of the image.
