Castle at Dawn

[Morkel Erasmus]

It's awfully quiet in the Landscape forum these last few weeks. I would love to see more images posted for critique! Here's one of mine to lead the way :t3

This is one of the first photos I properly processed from our recent trip to the Drakensberg mountains. It's a lovely sunrise over a peak called "The Garden Castle" in the southern Drakensberg region of South Africa (also the only morning we had some nice colour in the dawn sky). It helped that this peak was directly behind our chalet as well :w3

Techs:
Nikon D800
Nikkor 14-24mm f2.8
f11 @ ISO-200
Blend of 3 exposures using luminosity masks

[Robert Amoruso]

Nicely composed Morkel. The "flow" of the FG field, the peak and the the clouds draws the viewer's eye into the scene. I like how you handled it.

[Don Lacy]

Wonderful color and I really like the balance between the sky and land. I looked at this as a Pano cropping the top of the sky to the first faint ban of red and really like the result you lose the grander of the sky but gain a more yin and yang feel to the whole image with and equal amount of sky and land, just a thought.

[Rachel Hollander]

Hi Morkel - fantastic color and detail in the sky. Comp works extremely well.

TFS,
Rachel

[Jerry van Dijk]

Wow! Spectacular colors and a very strong composition. I'd consider cropping a little from the top and from the right. You'll remove some of the empty blue space from the top and move the crossing of the flowing line of the field and the mountain ridge a little off-centre.

[Roger Clark]

Morkel,

How about this (cropped of the top and a little of the bottom)? Also, a little more color could be pulled out of the gray sky near the top.

Roger

[Morkel Erasmus]

Thanks a lot folks.
Roger I like your crop too! :5