Pierced rock at sunrise

[Rene Quenneville]

Here is one of my first HDR landscapes. I took this picture early in the morning a few weeks ago on the shore neer the rocher percé in Percé, Quebec.
I took 5 exposures differing by 0.7f-stop each and assembled it in Photomatix pro.
around 1/30s, f/20, ISO 200. The colors of the moments were so rich and I was pleased to be able to reporduce it without posterization in my gradients.
Please give me your comments.

[Roman Kurywczak]

Hi Rene,
The colors are very vibrant and the stitching turned out very nicely. The silhouette of the rocks is not all that exciting though and seems to be lost in all the color. I cropped this down to a pano size and while it does emphasize the formations a bit more....I think concentrating on the larger formation with the arch, by using a longer lens would have strenghtened this compositionally.

[Robert Amoruso]

Hi Rene,

Spectacular colors. Good job with the HDR and no posterization which would be a problem with this color gradient.

I agree with Roman that the large rock with the arch is the most interesting silhouette in this image. The right side drags it down. I cropped some FG and the left part of the frame out. I did some cloning over what looks like a pier to come up with the repost. I upsized it to 800 pixel on the width to make it larger so I had to sharpen it again (created some halo). With the original pano and the images made, this crop would be easy. The cloning is your call - I was try to balance the left and right sides out.

[Joe Senzatimore]

Can't offer much on the crop,etc. but I do love the rich color captured in this image.

[David Kennedy]

Hi, Rene,
I would be tempted to follow the path laid out by Roman and Robert for this image. I agree that the rock formation with the window, as demonstrated by Robert, is probably the single most interesting part of the composition, and I think that if you follow his methods, you'll come up with a very nice result. If you don't want to go quite as far, a decent compromise would be a crop something like this. Here, I'm trying to emphasize the rock formation and its relationship to its surroundings, but without including too much more than its immediate neighbor to the left. The farther to the left the eye wanders, the less interesting the scene becomes.

Cheers,
David

[Rene Quenneville]

Thank you all for the very appropriate comments. The following repost includes a portion of the cliff. My son Joël and I took several different pictures of the sunrise, some of which include only the rock. We are still working on them and we will post one or two shortly. Your comments are very appreciated.

[Arthur Morris]

I do like the final version best. Good job by all above.