Took the following image from my back door early one morning as the sun was rising behind the fog sitting in the valley below by house. What do you think?
1D4 & 24 to 70 F2.8 series 1
1/4000 at F9 at ISO1250
Hand held.
Processed in ACR and finished off in CS6 where I used a luminosity layer to pull back the sun a little and cropped off the bottom to 16:9 ratio..
Hi Don
This is overall a beautiful photo:exposure, lighting, subject and processing. Consider cropping out the dark bottom to about 3/4 way up the dark foreground. This focuses the viewer towards the important parts of the composition which are the sheep, trees and light.
Thanks for commenting Mike.. You have confirmed my concerns. This FG was the main thing I was not completely comfortable with and unfortunately it appears slightly darker in post than on my screen. I think your idea of cropping is good and probably the best idea, an alternative might be to lift the FG a little more to add a little more detail there although (as you imply) that might divert attention from the subject. I will have another play, thanks again for your input.
Thanks for commenting Mike.. You have confirmed my concerns. This FG was the main thing I was not completely comfortable with and unfortunately it appears slightly darker in post than on my screen. I think your idea of cropping is good and probably the best idea, an alternative might be to lift the FG a little more to add a little more detail there although (as you imply) that might divert attention from the subject. I will have another play, thanks again for your input.
I love this, it is so evocative and a real sense of time of day. Nice subtle shafts of light and the hint of animals gentle grazing, a lot to take in here.
Don, I'm away off snapping so using the laptop, not ideal, but perhaps tweaking the colours more, lift the darker mid tones with a Curves adjustment, ditto the 3/4 tones for the FG just to get a bit more 'content' if you know what I mean. The black key line around the image throws the histogram, but some small areas are choked.
Don, not ideal, but this may give a direction to my thinking, hope all is well.
Ahhh Steve, good to hear from you again... and, as always, you seem to put your finger on the right spot... I like what you done here, and the subtle lift in the FG is closer to how I wanted the image to appear. The colours are also stronger, so I will have another play with the image along the lines you suggest. Happy snapping, and i hope our paths cross one day... and thanks for your comments.
PS: I was very impressed how you identified that another poster (Mike) was shooting with a reduced colour space (sRGB) in camera...
Hi Don...I like this image a lot. Very nice warm light from the rising sun and my initial thought upon seeing the image was taken acre of by Steve's repost...lift some detail out of the dark bottom...I think it works better than cropping away some...very nicely seen and captured. On a side note....if you had of used a graduated neutral density filter you would have been able to balance light a little bit better allowing even more detail to come through in the foreground.
Thanks for commenting.. I have reworked this somewhat along the lines put forward by you and Steve (and what I thought..) comments and will post later on today. I don't have a Grad neutral density filter, but have often thought it should be part of my kit. I want a soft edge (I think..) but how many stops would you suggest for "general use.."? 3??
repost with FG lifted, however it is not as evident on this sRGB image as it is on the Tiff I was editing... Anyway, I'm happy with the Tiff, than you all for your input..
Hi Don, I like this repost best of all....nicely done. As for the grad filters....I use Singh Ray filters and currently have a 1-stop & 2-stop soft edge reverse grad as well as a 3-stop reverse grad. A reverse grad is very useful for seascape type images. I seldom use my 1-stop grad mostly because the dynamic range on my D800 is so good it can handle a lot of scenes without the need for a grad filter. In your image here with sun higher in the sky a 2-stop grad filter would work nicely...if the sun was on the horizon a reverse grad would work better. To get yourself started using grad filters I would recommend a soft edge 2-stop grad filter.
Sheep in the fog..
Originally Posted by Don Railton
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