Foggy Sunset

[Judy Howle]

Sorry for the lame name! This was an interesting sunset last night with pretty magenta and blue tones and fog in the trees in the background. I zoomed in to show the coots and trees across the river with layers of fog. I used Topaz Adjust to enhance colors and contrast.
5D Mark II, f/4.5 @ 96 mm, 1/100, ISO 640 & 24 - 105 lens.

[Robert Amoruso]

Judy,

I like the framing of the diagonal cloud in the sky. Nice colors not over-done in post-processing.

I feel the coots more left in the frame would balance in the image better IMO. I feel that now they a too centralized. I understand your reason might have be the wake they are leaving for the current location of the coots, but I feel balancing the image wiht them left would still leave plenty of wake - assuming that was the reason. :)

Thanks for posting.

[Dennis Bishop]

I really like the look of this, Judy. The fog, colors, reflections, and changes in elevation are beautiful. While I agree with Robert about the relative position of the coots in the image, I wouldn't crop any to move them to the left. Too much good would be lost in the process. I like that you captured them because they provide a nice element in the lower part of the image.

[Judy Howle]

Thanks Robert! I wanted to capture the best sunset and foggy trees view in addition to the coots so that's why I didn't move them to the left. I could crop a bit off of the left though. Many on the forum may not agree but I am not opposed to centering when other elements in the scene come into play so that you would lose something you consider to be important if you changed the view.

[Judy Howle]

Thanks Dennis! That was my reasoning also.

[Judy Howle]

This is the next photo I made with the coots further to the left. I also cropped it with more off of the left. It looks a bit dark, what do you think? I think I intended to go back and lighten it some as I did the OP.

[Dennis Bishop]

There are two things besides the wonderful colors that I like about this scene -- the fog and the layer of trees in the background being lighter than the lower layer in the foreground. Overall, the darkness of this image seems just fine. Except that it reduces the tonal contrast between the trees in front and the fog and other trees further back. I played around to see what would happen if I modified a curves adjustment layer, trying to pretty much do nothing but lighten up the fog and background trees a bit. I had to mask off the water to keep the blacks, there, from becoming lighter. The dark areas in the upper part of the sky darkened some, but I thought that was okay.

I really hadn't intended to post the results, here, but that suddenly seemed better than more words.

[Judy Howle]

Thanks for the inspiration Dennis. I re-worked the image from Raw and I have decided to post it separately with how I did it compared to this one. It's amazing how much you can accomplish in Lightroom 4 which is where I did most of the improvements.