I was doing electronic housekeeping yesterday and found this. I actually have several exposures, some darker, some lighter, but I used a darker exposure and brought out shadow detail for these purposes since it was easiest.

I like the light in the valley, and I usually like sunstars and such, but part of me thinks the flare effect is too much, looks like a 60s movie.

What do you all think of it?

If people don't think it's too much, I might try to more carefully use multiple exposure layers, etc. This was shot on a Nikon D2x, and so if you just bring out shadow detail you bring out a lot of noise; more careful stacking of multiple exposures would be much better.

Further, another personal criticism: the methodology for this was just find a decent composition, setup, wait for the sun to come up, and then crop in PP. I think I could have done better if i more carefully evaluated the situation from an artistic standpoint.

Anyway, thanks for any comments.

The image you posted has been excessively downsized. I would recommend you repost an image of about 600 pixels in height. If so, I think you will find some of the forum regulars can work magic on this.

Shooting into the sun can yield impressive results....and also lots of failures. This one probably falls far short of what you saw mainly due to the very bad lens flare. I gave it a 2 minute fixup. I guess there is hope but if it were mine I just would not be satisfied with the lack of detail and the amount of cleanup needed. Again maybe my opinion would change if I saw a larger image.

Yes, post up the sooc ... vertical @ 800 or even larger @1000 or so since it is going to be cropped afterwards back down to 600-800 viewing size anyway.

Would like to take a stab at it (noise included), but will be on the road for the holiday, so it might be a bit before I get to it.

Be safe and have a Happy Thanksgiving.

BTW ... for those keeping score, (I'm not, but others are ) today is the semi-centurian mark for yours truly ... which puts me smack between "young pup" for some and "old fart" for others.

Congratulations on the Bday. You are now middle aged.

Happy b'day Kent.

My own take on flare is that one or two small flairs are ok, but this has too many and too large. The trick is to try to get the sun when it is about 1/16 exposed and the rest behind something.

Learned that at a David Meunch seminar.

Thanks, folks. This lens, Tokina 11-16 on a Nikon D2x, is particularly vulnerable to flare, but this is the worst I could do (in all my other pictures, even at sunrise, the flare is less noticeable).

Here the same picture scaled for my iPad.

When I get a chance, I'll play with it some more, I want to darken the sky some and merge in a longer exposure for the middle/foreground, which was has better tonality (and properly exposed so it isn't so wildly noisy!!!!!).

PS, congrats, Rustybug!!

I was thirsty ... so I opted for a diversion to a lemonade rendering.

Thanks, Rustybug, that's actually very interesting. What is a "lemonade rendering"?

Sometimes when I'm working with a lemon, I get better results by accepting it as such, and making good lemonade with it ... rather than trying to make it a peach that it never will become.

Peaches are my favorite ... but not every fruit produced is as delicious as a great peach. However, good lemonade can be pretty tasty too, even if it does come from a really sour lemon. Kinda like trying to turn a frog into a prince. Sometimes it's better to just have frog legs for dinner.

S&P to taste, of course.

A ha.

I find your try visually interesting - what PP did you do?

Mostly, I stumbled upon it.

I was exploring various aspects for noise reduction ... wound up playing with Median (Filter>Noise>Median) and found myself some potent sugar for those really sour lemons.