Columbia River Gorge Sunrise

[Bruce Murden]

From the Macro & More in the Gorge workshop May 2008. I recently worked on the RAW files I gathered for significant processing to capture the range of light I saw that morning. From a single capture, cropped and double processed in LR, then combined and further adjusted in PS.

Nikon D80, Tamron 17-50 f/2.8 @ 32 mm, ISO 100, f/9, 0.6s

Why f/9 and not smaller aperture? Sleepy, I guess. I don't think I was worried about the morning wind that day.

[Mark Fuge]

Nice image.

I would recommend you move the horizon line off center. Both up and down are options for this image to make it work. It depends on your interest in showing the sunrise sky, or the morning in the mountain landscape. My preference would be to highlight the sky, due to the great cloud formations you captured.

Use the rule of 1/3rds as a guide. But putting the horizon line on dead center I think detects from the otherwise great image.

[Roman Kurywczak]

Hey Bruce,
You answered my question regarding f9....but all in all I think it turned out well. I may see a bit of the merge though....as above the mountain....there is a halo/white boundary so you may want to re-visit the merge. I may lighten the FG trees just a hair also. I do love the pano here.....so my question to Mark is; Why add sky???....it appears to only be blue and adding base is just going to diminish from the distant mountains and water........this may be one of those times again where the ROT's is irrelevant and needs to be broken.

[Dave Mills]

Before I read Roman's comment I was thinking the exact same thing. Rule of thirds is an excellent guideline but in this case the composition is fine. I've been here twice and its not easy to capture an image that has some impact. You were lucky to get a strong sky. I think the blowing trees hurt the image somewhat.

[Gordon Craig]

This is really nicely done. I particularly like the panarama approach to the picture. Makes me inclined to review some of my old Columbia River Gorge pictures.