We were driving from Atlanta back home after Thanksgiving when the sky started looking amazing. I was driving, constantly looking out to my left. Finally, I apologized to my wife and pulled into a rest stop, saying I just had to grab a few shots. This was at 10mm.
Those are parking lots and the highway in the distance, so I had to time the shot to avoid cars crossing into the frame.
The editing on this began with combining two differently processed versions of the same RAW file: darker for the sky and brighter for the ground. Then the usual stuff was pretty simple: USM for both sharpening and contrast, plus a hue/sat layer to bring out the color in the leaves and sunset behind the trees.
Statistics
Place: 59 out of 115 Avg (all users): 5.5758 Avg (commenters): 6.0000 Avg (participants): 5.3095 Avg (non-participants): 5.7000 Views since voting: 884 Views during voting: 254 Votes: 132 Comments: 8 Favorites: 0
First impression is: great sky, boring foreground.
Composition:
The wide angle worked very nicely at making the sky quite dramatic. This is a unique composition by using it in portrait mode. I would be curious what the sky looked like horizontally. But in portrait mode the sky seems to be exploding upward. Wonderful.
Color:
Great color in the sky, good tonal range in both the sky and clouds. Focus in the sky seems good.
So why didn't it score better? Appears that the foreground really detracted from this image. The foreground does not add much other than a context. The trees are not particularly focused and they lack color. And since they are pointing into the center of the wide angle they in a way are fighting the exploding nature of the sky, almost trying to constrain the sky. It does create some interesting tension.
The objects at the botton of the image, by the road, do not add anything but clutter to the image and make it seem more like a snapshot. It is like the top 2/3rds of the image is a 6.3+ photo but as your eye moves down to the bottom it is anchored by a 5+ photo. Not sure how you can crop it to improve.
Execution and combining images is great. It is really only the composition and foreground that hurts this image.
Lovely sky patterns. Tonal range in sky is amazing and so the image as a whole is let down by the trees and ground which have relatively low contrast. Opening up the levels at the low end to bring out the trees would have taken away the focus from the lovely sky and so I think post processing the trees to become a silhouette might have been more effective
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