Winter landscape_Drakensberg

[Chris van Rooyen]

I made this image at the Bearded Vulture hide at Giants Castle. What drew me to the scene was the contrast between the sunlit peaks and the shaded valleys and hills below. Would love to have your comments, since I'm pretty new in the landscape genre..

Camera Model: Canon EOS-1D Mark III
Date/Time: 2008:06:23 07:06:19
Shutter speed: 1/60 sec
Aperture: 8
Exposure mode: Av
Flash: Off
Metering mode: Multi-segment
ISO: 640
Focal length: 70mm

[Robert Amoruso]

Chris,

Thanks for posting and a great post it is. Composition is very good. The slopes in the FG provide a good lead in to the image. The subdue FG lighting provide for two layers of color - a bit brighter FG and the darker middle-ground. Then you have the sunlit peaks in the BG with the strong side-lighting that defines there detail well.

In the shadowed areas you have nice details but contrast is low. You can do local contrast enhancement on them using a BG layer and USM - try 60/30/0 to start and tweak amount and radius to your liking. If the sunlit mountains become too contrasty, create a layer mask on the BG copy and paint black over them. Use opacity to vary affect as well.

[Chris van Rooyen]

Thanks Robert, much appreciated!

[Robert Amoruso]

Thanks Robert, much appreciated!

Your welcome Chris. When I was playing around with the USM LCE I like how it worked on the mountains in the BG as well so posted it below.

I am using an action I developed that uses a high pass filter as a Smart Filter to allow you more adjustability of the LCE affect. You can still do it the same way I outline above, just a bit more trial and error needed. The action is part of a group on actions I am working of for sale.

[Chris van Rooyen]

Yup contrast has definitely improved..

[Roman Kurywczak]

Hey Chris,
Robert's improvement definitely made the image pop! Very nice use of lines compositionally and the cloud adds just enough to the mtn to keep me in the scene.

[Douglas Bolt]

Hi Chris,

Beautiful image! Where is this spot located?

[Paul Marcellini]

Well composed and i like the repost. The little pop works. The only suggestion is to crop above the two dark areas at bottom of the frame. Otherwise, nothing to change here, really well done.

[Ed Cordes]

The repost is an improvement on this already good image. I like the color contrast betwen the FG and BG.

[Chris van Rooyen]

Thanks for the suggestions guys, appreciated. Douglas this is in the KwaZulu-Natal province of South Africa, on the border with Lesotho.

[Douglas Bolt]

Hi Chris,

I was wondering where it was located in relation to the Amphitheater, eg. http://www.birdphotographers.net/forums/showthread.php?t=15784

I don't recall seeing anything similar, but maybe it is just the light in your image that I didn't see.

[Chris van Rooyen]

Hi Douglas

No this is quite far from the amphitheatre more towards the central Berg.