Beauty after the Storm

[Patrick Sparkman]

Last week we had several tornado's in the Dallas area. We live east of Dallas so they were about 30 miles away and we only got thunderstorms. However, after the storms started to dissipate, we had a magnificent sunset. I am fortunate to have an empty field of Indian Paintbrush to frame in the foreground.

Canon 5D III, Zeiss 18 3.5, f8, 0.8 sec nominal exposure, +-2 stops HDR, processed with Photomatix and Nix Color efex 4. Minimal cropping, a couple of flowers on the edge removed with a quick mask.

All comments and critics welcome.

[Andrew Aveley]

Great scene , great colours......not a great fan of HDR but thats just me :) It has a very surreal feeling to it.Maybe a little local contrast to make it more 'life like".I dont know if it would be a no go but on your original exposures , what if the sky where more natural with fg and trees with less detail , almost silhouette?

TFS

[Robert Amoruso]

Nice set-up, Canon 5D Mark III and 18mm Zeiss lens, my next step.

I like you post-processing. Yes you can tell HDR, but it is not cartoon-looking or over-wrought. As a silhouette, not much reason for the FG.

I would try to eliminate flowers intersecting the bottom edge either by cropping (hard to do) or cloning (if you are inclined).

[Andrew McLachlan]

Beautiful scene Patrick. Love the colors in the sky and the wildflowers are arranged nicely, but do agree with Robert on the blossoms along the bottom edge.

[Don Lacy]

Lovely colors but I am having trouble with the HDR processing my main issue is that the trees and foreground should be darker then the sky it's physically impossible for this scene to exist as presented just a subtle darkening of those tonalities would stop my brian from yelling fake.

[Morkel Erasmus]

Lovely colours here, just dig it when the skies throw us lollies like this.
I agree with Don's previous comment - a slight selective darkening will make it appear more 'natural' as the eye would perceive it. Still - in the end it's your call :bg3: