Description: I’ve been trying to ride up to Chip Ross Park in the early mornings to beat the heat, the people, and get the flowers that only bloom in the morning, hopefully some animals and maybe a sunrise! I could see this amazing sun happening through the trees, it’s at a part that’s so steep I can’t ride my bike up it, so I was literally running up the hill with my bike until I could finally park the bike, grab my camera and continue running to catch this and a few other shots, which I hope to post as well.
Specific Feedback Requested: Anything , I tried bringing exposure up and highlights and shadows a bit, I also wanted the distant hills hills to be seen. I wish I could cut out the sky in the original image and put it in the foreground of the tweaked image, if that makes sense?
Pertinent technical details or techniques: Nikon D3400, 55mm, 1/80, f/16, ISO 100
Is this a composite? (focus stacks or exposure blends are not considered composites)
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A good reward for your effort! I like the FG grasses and silhouetted trees but would try moving the sun out of the center – maybe a crop from the left.
It’s a difficult brightness range. I don’t know what your original exposure looked like but I wouldn’t bring up brightness enough to blow out the clouds at the top. Shadows could probably come up. Highlights should go down. If you have a graduated filter it could darken the top sky a little without messing up other areas…
Thanks for looking, @Diane_Miller this is the original image, the upper sky was pretty bright, so it was hard for me to adjust the foreground without affecting it, unfortunately, any thoughts?.. oh, and I should mention that when I was there, I was trying different settings and this seemed like the best for getting the color of the sun and the rays and the clouds just right, when I tried exposing for the vegetation and the hills it blew out the sky…
I think your original exposure was quite good, with the trees as silhouettes and the sky as the story. The landscape elements in the FG and mid-distance are not nearly as interesting and “flattening” the image tonally detracts from the drama of the sky .
Thanks so much for your feedback @Diane_Miller ! I’m glad you like the original, I definitely like the sky better in the original as I really can’t improve on it!
You certainly made quite the effort to capture this image, Vanessa! Scenes with this wide dynamic range are next to impossible to pull off with one exposure so I think you did really well to come up with what you did. The sky turned out very nicely and the rays are certainly a nice touch. I know you tried to strike a balance on the brightness of the sky with the darker tones of the landscape. I hope you don’t mind, but I played around a little by darkening the highlights of the sky a little and brought the shadows of the trees down as well. I also did a crop to try and simplify the scene by getting rid of some lighter and darker areas. Here is what I came up with.
Thanks @Ed_Lowe for looking and your feedback! I like the crop and what you did to help with exposure. So you’re saying that this is an image that would benefit from being a composite?
