I perched myself at the head of this valley and watched as the light changed and the rain rolled in. I had hoped to get the rain coming up the valley but the wind direction wasn’t in my favour and it went off to the right (at least I stayed dry).
The light was constantly changing so this is a composite made over an hour or so and blended together.
I’d love some feedback. There is something about the sky I’m not keen on but I can’t put my finger on it. Is it possible to accentuate the rain?
Mottled light such as this is about the most challenging to deal with exposure-wise. And you nailed it! I love the comp with the sweeps of the road and stream leading back through the mottled lighting to the mountains beyond, all capped with those great clouds.
HI Chris, I love the quality of the light in this photo. The only comment I would make is that it appears to me that most of the ‘interest’ is in the top half of the photo - I wander if you considered cropping part of the lower section?
At the same time I like the way that the stream turns and exists on the left of the image together with the road… so I also understand why you framed it the way you did. Nice work!
Thanks Joseph, I appreciate you taking the time to reply.
I had the exact same predicament. I tried cropping a lot of the bottom but it just didn’t look right having the stream starting from the right side of the frame.
Hi Chris, I love what you did here with the dappled light. I think the sky looks fine, you could try to darken some of the clouds to give it a more moody look but too me it looks good the way it is. I have the same thought about cropping out the bottom as Joseph had mentioned. I like the way the stream leads you into the image unfortunately I feel that it gets lost in the shadow that makes up the bottom half of the photo. I would consider a pano crop just below where the light starts on the path to the left.
I’m going to go against the grain here, and say I like the original crop, but with the lighter foreground from the cropped image. I feel like the crop loses some of the lead-in effect from the stream. The horizontal portion of the stream works for me as an effective entry point into the image. I would shoot for something like this…
This is a challenging shot, very well done. I favor the original crop as the stream comes in from the left and leads you into the valley. I like @Ed McGuirk’s edits lightening the foreground. The sky is wonderful as is.
I actually like your original more in that the stream rolling out and to the left adds a level of intricacy and interest to the image. One thing you can try is to keep that square crop then stretch or distort just a bit to make it a 4x5 horizontal maybe? Otherwise, the scene is definitely quite nice and well done!
I like the mood, the subdued palette and the cropped version. There’s some graininess to the sky which looks like a side effect of trying to get more texture out of the sky. The very bright cloud, with blown highlights bothers me, you could partially clone some of the other clouds to fix this.
Looks like I’m doing a crop then! Thanks everyone I’ll crop it and upload it to see what the general consensus is.