Oaks and Hills, Central California Coast

[Rand47]

Made a few minor tweaks to make the sky a "little less" subtle.

[stamper]

A very nice pleasant scene but the sky looks overexposed on my monitor. Have you tried B&W because the detail in the foreground would possibly look good in B&W and the sky wouldn't be a distraction. Nice composition.

[thierrylegros396]

A very nice pleasant scene but the sky looks overexposed on my monitor. Nice composition.

+1

Thierry

[Jeremy Roussak]

A very nice pleasant scene but the sky looks overexposed on my monitor. Have you tried B&W because the detail in the foreground would possibly look good in B&W and the sky wouldn't be a distraction. Nice composition.

I rather like the colour, but I agree about the sky.

Jermey

[luxborealis]

Beautiful scene, but consider toning down the sky as suggested. And do try a B&W - great potential here!

[Rand47]

Thanks all . . .

Appreciate the comments on the sky.  This is my "anti-overdone-sky" campaign!  LOL  I was going for a literal, yet painterly look with emphasis on the beautiful soft colors created by the light overcast that tempered the otherwise contrasty light.
I've not messed with the colors at all except to lower the saturation on the yellow a bit.  Believe it or not the wild mustard was an intense yellow - a glowing saturated yellow that needed toning down just a tad to keep it from looking fake.  

There is no clipping in the sky, interestingly enough.  I played with bringing it down a bit, but didn't like it.  I also played with monochrome and split-toning but it just went "dead" compared to color.  This is one of those images, IMO, where color is an integral part of the composition.

This makes a lovely, delicate, print on Museo Silver Rag.  I think the transmissive nature of looking at it on-screen adds to the sky looking "too light" and with too little detail.  And with the proliferation of preference for dramatic grad-ND-skies I can certainly also "feel" the sense of "it's too light" relative to current norms.  I fought with myself a lot on this.  In the final analysis - of all the permutations I went through - I liked this the best.  

Appreciate the feedback, though... always good to have "echoed" the possibilities, considerations I went through to get to where I ended up.

Rand

[stamper]

With a scene like this I would have spot metered a cloud and added +2 EV and focused somewhere in the bottom half of the scene. This would have meant that there would have been detail in the sky and the foreground would have detail. Overall there would have been detail to process to my taste.

[riddell]

I have to agree with others that the sky is clearly overexposed, but also boring. You'd need to wait for a better time with a better sky.

Also the image seems over post processed. I'm guessing that was an attempt to improve the image?

Paul.
www.photographybyriddell.co.uk

[Peter McLennan]

I've looked at this image over two days and with several visits.  I'm still on the fence about the sky. 
The sky is just what the OP has described.  Delicate.  Painterly. It is clearly overexposed, but is this necessarily a problem?  The blue in the sky certainly adds significantly to the overall palette.  Perhaps a light grad from the top to darken the upper sky a little would relieve the somewhat toneless clouds and blue sky.

I dunno.  I love the image, though.

[EricV]

My initial reaction also was that the sky is too bright, but looking at it again, I see the attraction in this high key treatment, and I like it.  I can believe this looks better as a print than on a monitor.  I think I might compromise by darkening the sky slightly in the upper left corner, just to help contain the composition.

[Arlen]

Rand, I can see what you were going for in the light pastel sky, and though I would personally have opted for a little detail in the clouds, I agree with Eric that this way has a certain charm to it. And I find the image to be overall very pleasing. However, I don't think that we are seeing what you see on your monitor, for two reasons. First, this sRGB, jpeg-compressed version is indeed almost completely clipped in the clouds, contrary to what you wrote above, when checked in Photoshop. Maybe that wasn't the case before conversion. Second, LuLa forums have a size limit of 800 pixels wide for embedded images referred from external web sites, so your referenced Smugmug version has been downsized from its 1238 pixel size there, probably not by an optimal algorithm. You can get the full size to show up here (via clicking on a thumbnail) by attaching rather than embedding it.