After the sun sets

[tjons]

I took this one last night. How could I have done better?

NOTE: It has been edited and retouched in Lightroom and Photoshop.

Canon Rebel T1i
1/80
f/13
18mm
ISO 800

Attachments:

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[timtam]

Nice.
I would look at your horizon. It does not look straight to me.

Also try bringing up the exposure a bit on the lower part of the frame.

Try adding clarity to the sky only.

I like it.

[Ezra Morley]

It looks good to me! The composition is excellent, the sky being the prominent part since it’s what the picture is all about. There is just enough of the foreground to add interest, and keep it from being just a “picture of the sky”. The yellows in the sky look a little over-saturated to me.

I notice that the image was shot at ISO 800. Was there any particular reason for that? I generally try to lower the ISO speed, especially while shooting sunsets/rise, since the foreground is always underexposed, and will have to be brightened in post. “Pushing” a picture that was shot at an already high ISO sensitivity will only create more noise. However, I understand, that when shooting hand-held, it’s better to have a grainy clear picture, than a motion-blurred one. In this case, I would have tried lowering the ISO to 200, and see if I could get a usable shot from that. With Canon’s excellent Image Stabilization, you should easily be able to get a blur free image in the lighting you had there. (Of course you could also lower the aperture a little to compensate for the loss of sensitivity.)

I’m also curious, what would you edit in Photoshop, that you wouldn’t/couldn’t have done in Lightroom? 🙂

[James Staddon]

Stunning sunset, @tjons! My heart starts pumping fast when I see clouds like this forming at sunset.

The white balance seems to be too warm to me, looking at the areas of sky that are not covered by clouds. Looks like global warming instead of local adjustment for warming up the clouds. No pun intended. 🙂 In Photoshop this should be easy to achieve with layer masks.

In terms of composition, your balance between earth and sky is excellent, but I think I would have walked closer to the tree line. See how there are three more prominent trees silhouetted on the horizon? The one on the right and left look similar with the middle one looking different, so I think it would have been neat to frame the shot (still wide angle to include the dynamic cloud shapes) with just those three trees as your horizon (effectively cutting out formless mass of trees on the left and the sorta scraggly branches on the left).

No way to know unless I was there, but that’s what I would have shot for . . . as long as the foreground field held the same consistency throughout the entire bottom of the picture.

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