Seeing how this turned out I kinda wish I had the 10-24 vs the XF16, but I can't really complain. Funnily enough with the impatient puppy at hand I really couldn't set up for a proper shot, tried quick and dirty bracketing for HDR but went back and processed a single exposure to compare. The single exposure (this pic) was far more pleasing.
Any comments and criticisms are welcome, as always.
Thanks for looking.
Chris
Edit replaced the original link on flickr, changed the link here just in case.
I'm not quite sure there's much I can do there. I looked back through even the bracketed exposures and the darkest bits are, well, pretty dark. Any attempt to coax a bit more light out of them really just brings out a rather faded look. It could be that my processing skills are rather lacking, which in all fairness is highly probable.
That is assuming you meant increasing exposure/light in those sections them and not sharpening them a bit.
As a conciliatory gesture, how about another sunset shot from that same evening?
Great shots. You got a heck of a sunset. I have a couple of criticisms though. On the first one, as mentioned by another poster, the darks are a little dark but also I think there is more detail that you can pull out of the highlights in the sky. Look at the reflection and you will notice that there is more highlight detail in the clouds than there is in the sky. You could try to pull the highlights down with the GND filter. Happy shooting!
Dan
I started with another exposure and have put it through its paces. Not sure if this is better or not, but I tend to think it is improved over the last one. At the very least there's a bit more detail in the trees if nothing else.
I'd argue that my processing skills are ham-fisted in comparison to pretty much everyone else in this sub-forum and that there was already a decent amount of "painting" involved, most notably with some dodging, burning, and blurring, but I'll take the compliment
I wound up using Lightroom + X-Transformer and then mucked about in Affinity Photo. It seems a decent combo that I'll have a long time to work with before I arrive at a middling level, let alone a mastery of it. Still, given this is a hobby and not a profession the journey is all part of the fun.
