This was shot from a moving car at 30 or 40 MPH while heading up to the mountains to go skiing.
I couldn't resist rolling down the window and snapping some shots of the scenery. I cranked up the shutter speed to try and compensate for the motion and snapped away.
When I went through the pictures later, I was surprised to see that I got a few decent looking shots.
I made the following edits in photoshop (taking advantage of the special December rules):
Adjusted the sky and mountains separately using layers.
Adjusted levels, curves, color balance and brightness / contrast.
Used Gaussian blur to smooth out the gradient in the sky.
Used the "Photo Filter" adjustment to add a warmer tone to the interior of the mountains.
Added a white border using the "stroke" command.
Resized from 1600x1200 to 640x480.
Sharpened with unsharp mask.
Statistics
Place: 81 out of 193 Avg (all users): 5.8299 Avg (commenters): 7.0000 Avg (participants): 5.7563 Avg (non-participants): 5.9467 Views since voting: 963 Votes: 194 Comments: 5 Favorites: 0
Just an all around good photo and I like it. I bet this looks really good uncompressed and at full size. Very clean, well composed and I think you waited for the good light.
The resolution is excellent here, even with the 640x480 crop. I like the blue tones in the sky, but the time of day also casts more shadow on your scene. I would prefer a bit more light in the valleys, but it is also nice the way it is. Nice work.
Add photograph to your favorites
Add photographer to your favorites
Photographer found comment helpful.