Desperate for some practice on my landscape composing skills I set out to a family friend's farm close to our town. Choosing a scene is difficult in these parts as you have to compete with miles and miles of pylons, numerous factories and power plants with smoke stacks and overall lack of strong natural compositional elements (no hills, mountains etc). These are the challenges of living on the South African Highveld - the most densely populated and industrious area of the country.
Luckily, on our friend's farm there are some old ruins that can spice things up a bit. I'll definitely visit this place some more during the summer, and especially towards autumn when the cosmos starts blooming. I went to shoot the ruins at sunset but all I got was a raging wind and thundershowers all round. It's raining most every day now so I'll have to take what I can get.
Created this image with 5 exposures in manual mode. Blended in Photomatix and punched back some details from the originals in CS 3. Went for a central horizon here cause I wanted to include enough of both FG and that moody sky, and dang some rules deserve to be broken sometimes. :)
Your comments highly appreciated.
Techs:
Canon 1000D with 18-55mm IS @ 18mm
f16 @ ISO-100
Hey Morkel,On my desktop which issn't calibrated yet....so the FG colors appear a bit over the top.....but I will check on the laptop tomorrow......I still feel that you should go more to a pano.....eliminate some of the FG with a crop just below the main boulder pile.......concentrates the viewer on the ruins and the ominous rain clouds......all in all nicely composed and a good job on the HDR.....just the crop will make this stronger for my tastes.....let's see how others feel.
Hi Morkel, After looking at the crop Roman suggested I agree that it does strengthen the image. The drama emanates from the rain clouds in the distance and was nicely handled. On my monitor the grass doesn't look over saturated.
thanks for viewing and the suggestions Dave, Curly & Roman...
here's the pano crop as suggested, thanks for that. greens are fine on my monitor - they WERE overcooked and I had to desaturate yellows by about 25% (part of the HDR effect)
Curly - I tried a few comps, there's also an oldies car wreckage behind the ruins, but the weather forced me to pack up pretty quickly :)
Yep....works for me too as the rocks don't appear as busy.......and now on my calibrated laptop....colors are fine! Hope to get the desktop calibrated this weekend.
Highveld Ruins (HDR)
Reply With Quote
