Crazy storms and late day light make for some incredible colours. These coloured skies are rare and I am usually not able to photograph them when they happen. This time I was lucky. Not only was I chasing the storm I was blessed with incredible light and calm conditions.
This image is straight out of the camera. As in no processing. Just ACR's default settings and a tiny bit of cropping. More like shaving a sliver or two off the edges and two tiny specks in the water were cloned out. I know the hottest trend today is to spend 80-100 hours processing an image from something to something beyond reality. I've done it, don't like it and I really want to spend as little time processing an image as possible. I'll still process images but it's nice to say; "here, this is right out of the camera. No processing!" Not sure if I will even bother processing this one as I like how it turned out. This kind of light is real and if you're lucky and chase it, you might find it. Or you can always fake it in post too! I prefer to just polish what mother nature gives me even if I lean a little hard from time to time.
Excellent balance and purple/magenta hue in the sky. The balance is so good, I'd kind of like to see something other than your watermark in the lower right, but I guess it can't be perfect (not that you should remove the watermark).
Wow.. great shot! I agree with your sentiment about post processing landscapes into something they are not, and feel that people assume shots like this are post-processed. Nice work!
This is a great image and an inspiration. I have been in the HDR world for the last 6 months and am trying to recover:-)
I did give up ND grads about the same time because of too much color cast and witness lines. We do need to help the camera a bit in these low light cases, either push something, use ND's or blend. I am trying for near finished images during raw conversion.
What a cool shot and love the colors and light in this, and congrats on not really having to process it. Certainly that seems to be the exception and while I would love to do that too, I am not sure how I would fill the 79 hours and 59 mins left over now from processing??
Great capture Scott!
It's refreshing to see nearly sooc images like this can stand on their own. And this images does that and then some.
I often wonder why several thousand dollar cameras and several thousand dollar lenses require so much processing and PS skills to make a beautiful image.
I'm glad you didn't go overboard on the processing and crank the epic slider to the far right. That would have stripped this scene of it's honest beauty. As I view this photo, I can almost smell the damp air, and feel the coolness in the air. I really like the calm feeling on this one.
Thank you all very much! I will note that not all lighting conditions will be this "easy" to photography. Some do require more exposures are other techniques to capture all the light. Then there is how much noise are you willing to put up with vs blending exposures. The Sony's raw files sure do allow for a lot of pushing in post if needed.
DougDolde wrote:
Very pretty shot but I'm surprised at no processing. I think you can do subtle enhancements that bring out what you saw with a bit more realism
Thank you Doug. For sure I could bring out many subtle qualities. I just really wanted to show that now all photography is doing back-flips in the computer chair behind a monitor!
