Hi there
I really wanted to share this photo with you. It was quite an amazing moment and not often that everything lines up so wonderfully like last Saturday. I was at Þingvellir, South-Iceland, and had been out shooting all day and nothing spectacular had happened.By the time we got to the National park Þingvellir, it was magic time. As we were shooting the famous Öxarárfoss waterfall the sun went down behind the Almannagjá fracture, painting the sky with an orange tint.
This lasted only about 20 minutes and we had to think fast. As you can see, the contrast between the sky and the black cliffs is huge, way out of the dynamic range of my camera. I was only using a 6 stop ND filter to get the motion blur on the water, but did not have a graduated filter to darken the sky. So I simply used my hand, carefully placing it over the sky while watching through the viewfinder, and then moving slowly to soften the edge. And when there were around 2 secs left of the 20″ exposure I removed it from the lens, allowing a proper exposure of the sky. I the opened up the shadows a bit in Lightroom, did some sharpen and clarity adjusments.
I would appreciate all thoughts on this, what could be done better and maybe specially on post-editing.
Tryggvi
I am quite impressed with how you managed to get the shot, without bracketing exposure.
Indeed there is a huge change in light between the brightest bright and darkest dark part of the image.
Below are few things, which could have impacted the image positively in my view:
1) I would have placed Öxarárfoss on one of the grid lines to follow Rules of third.
You might have had other constraints while framing. I understand.
2) The water has a slight blue colour cast, possibly due to the use of ND filter.
I would remove it, but it's a personal choice.
3) I think the vignetting is little heavy on top end of mountains. I would have reduced the opacity slightly.
Keep up the good work!!!!
Thank you for your kind words. I will check the blue tint on the water.
Great control and technique for a great picture!
Thank you!
Amazing picture congratulations!
The rock at the top right and at the left at the horizon are quite dark. I'd like to see those areas lightened up more to bring back detail. We can see from the other areas in shadow that these two areas don't match up with the scene. The thinking behind this was probably to darken them to draw attention towards the center and lighter areas of interest, but because they are SO black in a large area I'm actually drawing even MORE attention to them. That's my only nitpick, the image is superb though.
Great story! and I think It's a great image, so congratulations!
Thank you all so much for your kind words.
Ryan, thank you for good advice, I will surely reopen this image in LR and see if I can work on the things you mentioned.
Happy holidays