Boring Winter Skies

These are, again, multiple misaligned exposures merged in Photoshop. In both cases, the dramatic sundown sky was photographed through tree branches. My mother, with whom I rarely disagreed, would have thought the original exposures were "pretty." I try not to do "pretty," which bothered her a lot when I would take pictures of her. I find "pretty" boring, hence the titles of some recent posts.

For those who have not seen my earlier posts or bothered to read the explanations thereof, each of these is the result of merging 20+ source images. I shot, handheld, with a 400mm lens on a Nikon D850. In Photoshop, I used the auto-blend feature without previously aligning the images, which resulted in a pretty chaotic result. For #1, I left the top layer out of that mix because I wanted to see the bird sitting on the branch, and reduced its opacity to about 30%. For #2, the first step was a failed attempt to align the images, but the result was somewhat interesting. I then surrounded each source layer with a thin yellow stroke as a separate layer. I used the auto-blend feature and then merged the source images. The yellow strokes were merged separately on top of the merged source images. I added some context-aware fill around the irregular parts to create a 3x2 image, drew a red stroke around it, and then added more context-aware fill around that.

FWIW, I also used tools in Photoshop and NEO to adjust color, contrast, etc.