Had to grab the sunset....

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MarcG19
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p.1 #1 · Had to grab the sunset....

...but I'm not sure I grabbed it well enough.

Anyway, Monday when I arrived at the Denver airport there was a pretty nice sunset. Fairly typical for that part of the West (I grew up near Santa Fe NM), but I had my camera with me so I had to get a shot, and then post process it on the plane back today....

I saw this as a sky-and-cloud-formations-at-sunset type picture, so I figured I'd use the widest I had (12mm f.2 on an Olympus EM-5, 24mm equivalent on a 35mm sensor). That wasn't wide enough for what I saw, so I put it in portrait and did a 3-shot pano (handheld). A fair amount of the edges were content-aware-filled.

Anyway, looking at it as I post processed on the plane today, my wheels started turning. Your thoughts appreciated

Three quick things I'm going to correct next time I open up Photoshop

- blot out a small circular cloud a little to the left of the center
- clean out the bottom middle thing in the parking lot
- not make the bottom left corner so dark

A few reality-to-photo problems I can think of:

- the cloud in the upper left was a very shiny gold, and my mind's still obsessed with it. The RAW file captured it as white, I tried playing with the color in that area with Viveza, but I don't think I quite got it. I'm particularly concerned about the color relationship between the cloud as is and the rest - does it look off?

- I'm not sure it's compositionally strong. I should have gotten more of the cloud formations to the right and left, and made it a wider pano. Also, the brightest points are the sun and the clouds, and they're off enough that it's a bit of a disconnect between them.

- How about that tall lamp post in the bottom left? Good tie in or distraction?

Other considerations:

- this probably would have been best with an ultrawide? At least 18mm in 35mm equivalent? Of course, you don't get equipment for one photo (unless you're gonna make lost of money off of it) and amateurs with no interest in selling images shouldn't let things like this drive purchases, but this gets me thinking that a 9-14mm or even 7-14mm (18-28 and 14-28 equivalents) would be useful. Balancing this with the rest of my camera/lens equipment is an additional problem (especially since I have an ultrawide for my APS-C cameras, which I don't bring for casual trips anymore because of size. Balancing APS-C and micro4/3s has been a challenge).

Anyway, comments/thoughts on what I could have done better and how I can post-process this appreciated.

Aug 18, 2012 at 02:56 AM

ben egbert
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p.1 #2 · Had to grab the sunset....

I think there is too much empty sky here. The sunset color at lower right center is not enough to make a sunset, the real story here is the cloud. But the cloud would not work alone. Between it and the sunset, you don't have enough to carry the whole.

Looks like a nice capture and processing, especially on a plane. But the scene while I am sure it was great to see in person, is hard to convert to a photograph. Some scenes are just that way.

Aug 18, 2012 at 02:18 PM

sbeme

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p.1 #3 · Had to grab the sunset....

ben egbert wrote:
I think there is too much empty sky here. The sunset color at lower right center is not enough to make a sunset, the real story here is the cloud. But the cloud would not work alone. Between it and the sunset, you don't have enough to carry the whole.

Looks like a nice capture and processing, especially on a plane. But the scene while I am sure it was great to see in person, is hard to convert to a photograph. Some scenes are just that way.

Exactly. And the glory of sunsets is especially hard to share.
There is quite a bit of empty sky. But, in addition the image would benefit from another point of interest or framing with more foreground silhouette.
Scott

Aug 18, 2012 at 02:51 PM

AuntiPode
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p.1 #4 · Had to grab the sunset....

You could select the lower clouds and foreground, blur the edge of the selection and bump the exposure and possibly gamma to add some snap to that part of the image. Alternately you could apply the dodge tool.

Aug 18, 2012 at 09:14 PM

MarcG19
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p.1 #5 · Had to grab the sunset....

Thanks folks, I agree with all the comments. The vision was the semicircle that the cloud formation was making+the color of the sky+the beautiful golden hue of top of the most prominent part of the cloud formation on the left half, with only the most basic appearance of the mountains and parking lot to give it some grounding.

However, the composition is off - I need more of the scene to the right and the left (to make it more of a panorama, and as is there's too much blue sky. Oh well.

Aug 19, 2012 at 07:33 PM

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