Mount Cook lillies and shelter

This is a lovely, peaceful shot, Bia. The sky is just a bit washed out. Perhaps a soft grad nd may have helped...don't know. Maybe boosting the green color saturation a tad also.

You can make you image up to 650 pixels on the longest side. Making the image a little larger will help us see and appreciate it better.

The soft light of the rain makes for very pretty color and light. It's a shame that the sky is so bright because it draws my attention away from the other beautiful features. Darkening the sky would help this a lot.

Also I think either tilting the camera up or down so the dividing line between the ground and the mountains wasn't in the center of the shot would help too.

- Dan.

All in all avery nice image. I understnad why you made all the choices you did; however I wonder if, had you waited a bit, you might not have gotten more blue in the sky? Another thought would be to go vertical, to include all the desirable elements (lilies, shack, mountains, mist) while eliminating the boring part of the sky. Great light on the FG and nice composition.

Lillian

Once more thanks for the very helpful comments. Lots of things to keep in mind next time!

Unfortunately I didn't own a GND at that time (just got my first set a couple of weeks ago, still learning how to use them!), so that was not an option

Dan, unfortunately this is the size image the site that hosts my pictures is using now. Any way I can resize it? Hopefully this is only temporary, as I'm having my own site built (will ask for suggestions soon :roll: )

Lillian, I did wait a bit longer, and I'm grateful I took this shot, as the weather just got worse and worse (that was actually the only blue patch I saw all day). Can't recall if I tried a vertical composition before shooting (it's been a while), probably not...

Cheers,

Bia

The sky definitely detracts. You might try burning it in a bit in PS and make the sky more dramatic, it there is enough detail there to do that. In the future, you might try bracketting down so you have some darker sky and with the strong foreground, you might combine the darker sky with the properly exposed foreground in photoshop. . I don't know how to do that but many people here or on some other sites could help you with that. I have not gotten to that lesson. Or, you could outline the sky only and add saturation to that part of the image alone
All in all a neat location and pretty good image with only the one problem. The decision to include the foreground flowers makes it a stronger image which is neat. I wish all problems were as solveable as this.
With an ND Grad, you run into the problem of horizon which is not straight , as with the mountains, but with a soft edge ND grad, you could use it on the mountains and sky.

Nice as is, but I think I'd move the shelter off centre. Can you tell me exactly where this is? Looks like eastern side of the hills to me.

Cheers,
Neil.

Hi again,

Steve, like you I haven't got to that lesson yet, but that's something I've been thinking of trying lately, even as an experiment.

Neil, this was taken on Mount Cook National Park when I was walking up the Hooker Valley, going towards Hooker Glacier. This shelter is located on the right of the track, just past a tiny bridge.

Cheers,

Bia

All good suggestions thus far. Shot has real promise, but my eye is pulled by the light to the upper right corner. Selective adjustment to the background in curves might get you some detail there if it's there on the slide.

Rich

One of these days I will get to NZ This is a nice image that would have been engance with a split neotral density filter.

I like this image. Agree with others aboutthe ND grad.

Great foreground! Would like to see a less bright sky though. Either ND or some digital work (which might be preferrable to avoid discoloring the mountains).

Would love to see this at the proper 650 pix width...


Nice work!

Anders