hfillmore Offline Upload & Sell: On
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Alan, Ed, and Bob ........ thanks for the comments on the comp. The more shots I take, the more I come to appreciate the power of simplicity. I try to concentrate on simplicity whenever I remember, but it in this case, there was no need to remember anythng..... the scene was just so, well ........ simple. I suppose I could have managed to screw it up if I had complicated it by using a wider angle lens, and including more details of other stuff, but I didn't. Now that I think of it, I guess I must have been going for "simple", which is why I used the 400 on a 1.3 crop. I just wanted a simple sun.
One thing amazed me after I took this shot ........ in spite of the fact that I was shooting directly into the sun, this shot came from a single shot, with a single conversion - no layering, blending, or ND grads. That's the power of that Sahara dust in the air. It seems to act like nature's ND grad. Even though the dust is not visible to the naked eye, it is powerful enough in it's ND effect that it actually brought the sun down in brightness to a level that actually allowed some detail and color in the sun, while still giving a decent exposure to the rest of the scene.
I was actually shooting 7 shot brackets, figuring I'd have to layer and blend to come out with a decent result, but it just wasn't necessary - a single exposure did the trick. Of course, had I not been bracketing, and taking so many shots, I'd probably not have had the necessary selection of exposures to choose from, so in that sense, the multiple shot bracketing certainly helped. I probably took a total of 150 shots, so I had a pretty good pool to select from.
Thanks again for the comments,
Harvey
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