[Rob Barron]

This is rather unusual for me but I thought I'd post it to see what people think. I have done very little to this pic, just desaturated very slightly (it was almost mono anyway) and a shallow S curve to push the contrast enough to separate the FG and BG. I like the simplicity of this shot, there is nothing powerful, nothing dramatic, just a simple composition with natural lighting.

What do you think?

Cheers,
Rob

[chrisa]

Yes it has something about it. Almost like you are walking up to the hill to view the lake in the distance.

Like the fading mountains and interesting clouds. Just wonder if the foreground could be lightened a little, or maybe works even better in mono ?

[j sotelo]

I like this one, but I would love to be able to see the rich beautiful colors in the landscape.
tweaked it a little hope you dont mind.

[chrisa]

That's a niceer foreground for sure. Not sure whether I prefer the previous lighter clouds though.

[JMitchell]

A nice shot Rob but I feel that there is too great a loss in detail in the shadow areas, and as you can see in Sotelo's version, the colour information doesn't appear to be present. Did you shoot RAW for this? And the biggest question.....why no HDR
EDIT: aside from the natural lighting bit tho

[Markulous]

Jack's hit the proverbial nail on the head (well, apart from the question re. HDR! )



Quick edit so it doesn't look very 'finished' but I put more detail in the FG - and B/W'd the FG

[JMitchell]

Nice pimp mark, and as per your comment about HDR, why not? I think just being able to capture all the ranges, without lucozading it might look good.

[Rob Barron]

I absolutely wanted to avoid an HDR look to this shot. I have nothing against HDR and have used it once or twice myself (see here: Derwent Water Jetty - Pixalo Photography Community) but I don't like everything being HDRed just for the sake of it.

I could very easily have lifted the detail in the foreground but that wasn't what I was trying to achieve here. I kept just enough light in the FG to avoid it being black, a hint of detail only so to speak, and it was the fact that it had almost no colour that appealed to me, hence I desaturated the sky a touch to remove the last bit of blue (extremely small amount there in the first place).

Mark's pimp is ok, just brings a bit more into the FG, still changes it from the image I liked but makes a very good image in itself. The coloured version is far too strongly coloured and makes it a picture of the foreground with a BG of mountains. My aim was for the picture to be more about the distant lake and mountains and just allowing the silhouetting of the trees to add FG interest.

I guess it shows that many images, especially landscapes, have a huge variety of images contained within them and it is all down to how you want to see it.

Could I just ask for a couple more comments on the original picture as it was that specific look and feel that I wanted to canvas opinion on? Would croppng another centimetre off the bottom so that the FG is not so dominant help?

Cheers,
Rob

[Markulous]

Originally Posted by JMitchell

Nice pimp mark, and as per your comment about HDR, why not? I think just being able to capture all the ranges, without lucozading it might look good.

I have what is probably an unreasonable prejudice against most filters, HDR amongst them - but very rarely do I like the result.

The HDR software is getting there - I've seen a beta'd version produce a 2 image HDR which was very good: scene was someone's back yard (it was just taken as an example) but there was absolutely nothing to giive away it's processing credentials (exposure and the all important shadows were spot-on!) - apart from some very minor blur around a tree (it was windy but the S/W managed to almost prefectly freeze the action and remove the image seperation)

[danpen]

Personally I prefer Robs original to the pimps, he's tried to do something a bit different and I think it works. In that shot the foreground is barely more than a silhouette and that encourages your eye to explore the distance, I find myself imagining a journey through that landscape.

Bringing out the foreground colour as the first pimp just makes this an everyday landscape shot, that we've seen a thousand times and it no longer gels with the background.

Marks pimp, while better, is just a bit too monochrome and unnatural for me.

Jack, what on earth is Lucozading something? I must be getting old.

cheers

Dan

[danpen]

Three posts almost simultaneously, Rob I hadn't read yours when I posted mine but glad to see I was right about the desire to focus on the background.

cheers

Dan

[Markulous]

Originally Posted by Rob Barron

Could I just ask for a couple more comments on the original picture as it was that specific look and feel that I wanted to canvas opinion on? Would croppng another centimetre off the bottom so that the FG is not so dominant help?

Personally, I dislike the heavy black base unrelieved with any detail at all - it overpowers the subtle misty remainder - I see too many around, maybe!