Fiery Bluebonnet Sunset

[Patrick Sparkman]

I do not often post to the landscape forum, but I will take shots of anything so here goes. This is a really nice bluebonnet field my wife found a week ago. We are in East Texas, and most days have been very windy. However, the wind laid down Saturday night and we went out hoping for a good sunset.

If you have not seen the news, there are some pretty major fires burning West of Fort Worth, and they created this terrific sunset. I have been playing with HDR using Photomatrix, so this is a combination of three different exposures. It is also a stitched panorama using the Canon 24 TS-E II shift movement. This lower resolution jpeg, does not really do justice to the almost 40 megapixel image. All comments welcome.

Canon 1D IV, Canon 24 TS-E, iso 400, f9.0,1/13 sec (the nominal middle exposure), 3 images bracketed +- 2 stops, 3 images stitched (total of 9 images taken), Photomatrix Pro tone-mapping, small house cloned out in URC

[Roman Kurywczak]

Hey Patrick,
That is an amazing number of blue bonnetts!!! Horizon line above trees appears a bit funky......and I'm not 100% sold on the comp.......as the FG looks a bit flat. My guess is that you had mmajor compression when resizing for the web.........so given that.....even w/o the strong focal point......this has a great look to it although I may have preferred a 1-3 split or 1-4. I hope you took a ton of these with different comps!

[Andrew McLachlan]

Hi Patrick, that is definitely a lot of flowers! Agree with Roman on the flat foreground. I like this the comp, but wonder if a little more sky would be better to the overall scene.

[Dave Mills]

Hi Patrick, good advice given above. I might also add that sometimes images like this look stronger as a vertical. Another idea is cropping to the left of the yellow sky area. Would love to get to Texas for the wildflower season... I'm going down around Macallan to shoot migratory birds in about 10 days...

[Patrick Sparkman]

Thanks for all of the great input. The funky sky is the compression. I guess the pixels were all spent on the flower texture, so it just gave up on the sky. I do have several different compositions, but my intent with this one was to show the incredible size of this field of Bluebonnets.

I guess that I should have gotten lower, and put more sky in the top.

[Robert Amoruso]

Patrick,

IF you crop more into a pano, say 1/3 up from the bottom, I feel this strengthens this image.

[Tom Redd]

for a guy that grew up in Fort Worth, thanks for bringing a piece of home back to me. A lot of work results in a fine photo. I know how impressive these fields are. I would like to have seen the hi-res shot.