Beginner Harborough Rocks Sunrise

S

steve_w

Messages
89
Edit My Images
Yes
Hi all

Never tried doing landscapes (well not to any real serious level) so when visiting my folks in the Peaks I thought I would get up and visit a local point. Was a difficult walk to the top as I'm not very mobile at the moment but I got there just in time for the sun rise.

Its the first thing I've done in months that I've looked forward to and been excited about and can't remember the last time I saw the sun come up.

I had to merge two images together to get the background and foreground so forgive the amateur photoshop attempt :)

Gentle critique and input welcome ;) as I really want to improve my skills in photographing landscapes.

cheers




harborough rocks sunrise by steve westbrooke, on Flickr
 
Last edited:
Both images look under exposed. The metering has exposed for the sky, unfortunately leaving a lot of blocked up space on the second especially. That is unless you deliberately went for the sillouette look. Sunlight is also blown in the second. The camera can't cope with such extremes.
 
Craig20264 said:
Both images look under exposed. The metering has exposed for the sky, unfortunately leaving a lot of blocked up space on the second especially. That is unless you deliberately went for the sillouette look. Sunlight is also blown in the second. The camera can't cope with such extremes.
Click to expand...

So they're pretty bad then lol!

Totally understand the concept of exposure but clearly lack practice then.

Second image was supposed to be a silhouette which I thought was ok despite the slightly over exposed sky. First image was my first attempt with photoshop and using layer masks, interestingly its bright on my laptop screen but fairly muted on my ipad so going to try and calibrate my laptop screen to enable me to better pp my images.

Cheers for the input
 
Last edited:
I like the second shot. If these were taken in RAW you may have some scope to recover the highlights in a package like lightroom or photoshop. Personally I would crop most of the black from the bottom of the photo and maybe crop the left hand side to put the pointy thing on top of the rock on a 3rd line. I like the right hand side of the image as the light falling on the hills gives nice depth and draws you into the image.
 
Exposure wise these are much better with nice lighting on the rock. Blown sky in the second but definitely a big improvement.
 
Thanks Craig it's interesting as I wasn't sure on the second two at first but having cleaned them up I definately prefer them now.

What's the best way to capture the sky then? I'm shooting on a d7000 with a 16-85 but don't really want to buy to much kit until I have my ability dialled in with what I have. I've read about grad filters would they be worth looking in to or should I look to shoot RAW so I can process the images more accurately?

Thanks
 
I would just leave camera set to JPEG+RAW and you always have raw file to pull extra detail out
its important to get exposure correct
try bracket shooting till you learn what metering setting works best for a particular shot
Don't beat yourself up it will all come in time
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top