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Russell Maddrey's picture

Grand Canyon Sunset Composite

Three images combined to get the best details as the light changed. One image for the canyon at golden hour, an image for the sun touching the canyon rim, and an image showing the color in the clouds after the sun went down. Thoughts?

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4 Comments

My thoughts are, That's beautiful!

one of my favorite subjects and one that is hard to do justice to. good job

I think the concept is OK, Russell, but execution of these composites has to be just-so or they can look distractingly unreal to me. There are two such problems to my eye here:

Firstly a dark band just below the distant horizon, the inverse of the more common sky "haloes".

Secondly, and more obvious at a glance is the unnatural-looking brightness of (a) the distant cliff face at left, which "should" be deeply shadowed, however attractive its textures & contours are, and (b) the foreground rock & bluff at lower right..

Hope I'm not being too harsh, but they are my immediate thoughts, since you ask. It's very hard to get good modelling of landscape features with this strong contre-jour lighting, as it all tends to be flatly and dimly lit by skylight only..

I really appreciate the honest feedback! Your comment does make sense and may justify some dodge/burn adjustments