On September 29th, I was exploring the eastern Sierras for early fall colors. I noticed the clouds looking promising for sunset, and made my way over to the Mono Lake tufa area. What I experienced was one of the finest sunsets that I have ever experienced. All images were taken with a Nikon D800 and the Nikon Nikkor 24-70mm f2.8 lens.
Wow... that is some of the craziest clouds I have ever seen from that area! It must of been a crazy time too as those clouds and color are going off and you are scrambling from composition to composition!
I think I will go with #3 as my favorite.
One thought though for you on #2, 4 and 5. Myself, I don't think the compositions are as strong as they could be with anywhere from 1/3 to 1/2 of the foreground is just the pebbled/sandy beach. I would have suggested staying out in a couple of the areas where you could get the water reflecting the color but no beach coming in off the side like that. As it is for those three, I would suggest cropping some off the bottom to lose that beach area.
So don't get me wrong, I think you came away with some killer shots. I just wanted to give you suggestions for next time to help make even stronger compositions there.
Birdie, Jim, kovairaja99, and Tyler, thanks for looking and commenting!
Jim, I am always appreciative of your thoughtful comments. In response to your feed-back, I played around with the images and came up with two updates that I like better than the originals. The first update crops away about a third of the bottom portion of image four: http://kwilliam8.smugmug.com/Places/California/i-W8Rrt7W/0/L/20130929-_D8K1384-print-L.jpg
The second update is much more subtle, cropping away a smidgeon of the bottom left hand corner of the last image (maintaining the aspect ratio, but removing a bit of the beach on the bottom and a bit of the tufa formation that was straddling the left hand side of the image): http://kwilliam8.smugmug.com/Places/California/i-xdKbhWG/0/L/20130929-_D8K1396-print-L.jpg
I think these are stronger versions of the last two images. Thanks for the feed-back. Much appreciated!
Keith W.
Yeah this sky is seriously amazing. I would loose my sh*t if I ever saw something like this haha. Im not a huge fan of the compositions though, as I would like to see a bit more of the stacks included in all of them. #2 is my favourite of the bunch though, and especially so when I crop it to the bottom of the shoreline on the left. It does the best job with contrasting the hard foreground stacks with the silky smooth sky.
John and Justin, thanks for the feed-back. Justin, I appreciate your suggestion. If I cropped image 2 at the bottom, then I would lose some of the reflection of the sky in the lake. I see your point, and in fact, I had tried cropping it that way, but I slightly preferred the version that I show here. thanks again.
Keith W.
