This image has had a fair bit of post processing, so if you're interested in the technical details:
After wading through some pretty icy water to get to a photogenic position in the river (with my tripod being very handy in preventing more than the necessary amount of wetness), I set up my tripod on a teeny island and composed my shot. Although our eyes are capable of discerning a wide range of tones, a camera's sensor is far more limited, even when shooting in RAW format. So because the sunlight on the clouds and peaks was so much brighter than the shadowed river valley, I took a series of 6 bracketed exposures, so the highlights in each area of the image were correctly exposed:
Back in the virtual world of my pc, I processed the raw files into individual black and white images before combining them into a single high dynamic range (or HDR) image. HDR is commonly results in images that have an almost artificial painterly effect, but I prefer to use it to recreate a scene that is closer to what I experienced, bringing out the details that were visible to my eye at the time of shooting.
Finally I manually dodged the clouds in the middle and burned a few areas on the hillsides to selectively increase the contrast, added the coloured filter, something I usually don't like in my own images, but often admire in others', and viola...
I like that you haven't coloured it uniformly, leaving a bit of blue in the sky, and hints of green in the middle ground.
ReplyDeleteI'm not a big hdr fan, mostly because people usually overdo it, which leaves strange edge effects round objects in higher-contrast areas. I prefer rather it's use as a kind of alternative to the old ND grad filters (essentially trying to get the same effect), which used to be almost essential in landscape photography with wide-angle.
The water is just right here.
the colours of the grad filter worked just right - it actually is uniform but with the blue at the top fading into the orange at the bottom it's created a sort of greenish grey in the middle - I love it when things work out serendipitously!
ReplyDeletefunny, the classic painters were trying to create a photographic effect (long before cameras) and now it's come full circle with photographers trying to create a painterly effect, but I must say, on the whole, there are very few masters - some things don't change!