Stacs of Duncansby

[PhotoEcosse]

The west coast of Scotland gets most of the attention in terms of providing a wide range of scenic locations for landscape photography. As a result, the east coast is often ignored.

Because a footpath makes access easy, the Stacs of Duncansby, just down the coast from John o' Groats, can be photographed from a wide variety of angles.

[Chairman Bill]

Doesn't look quite right to me eyes, on my monitor

[PhotoEcosse]

Doesn't look quite right to me eyes, on my monitor

I obviously can't comment on your monitor, Bill, but it looks OK (by that I mean realistic) on both of my twin Dell Ultrasharp U2711 screens calibrated with Spyder4 Pro. Maybe you are thinking that the green ferns on the rockfaces are a bit over-saturated but that is how they look in July in Scotland.

For what it may (or may not) be worth, exposure details are:

Nikon D3s
Nikkor 70-200mm f/2.8 lens at 135mm
1/100 at f/14, ISO 200
Lee 0.6 ND soft grad set high in frame and angled anti-clockwise

[Jeremy Roussak]

Interesting scene, but there's an air of unreality which I don't like much. It's not the colours, I think: it's the distribution of the light. The pinnacles in the distance look too pale and appear to me to have haloes around them.

Jeremy

[dmerger]

Doesn't look quite right to me eyes, on my monitor

+1, and it's not just the colors. It doesn't have a profile embedded, so I assume it's in sRGB?  I tried aRGB and ProPhoto, but it still doesn't look quite right.

[Wim van Velzen]

The scene is beautifull, but the pp looks not right. Another go?

Duncansby is one of my favourite spots too: http://www.fotografiewimvanvelzen.nl/sco/duncansby.htm

[Peter McLennan]

I love this image.  I want to go there.

It is unusual that all three stacks are of about the same density.  I wonder if darkening the foreground one would increase the sense of depth? Or darkening all three against the far background?

Also, I find the light area inside the arch at lower right a little distracting

I still love this image and the location.

[francois]

Interesting scene, but there's an air of unreality which I don't like much. It's not the colours, I think: it's the distribution of the light. The pinnacles in the distance look too pale and appear to me to have haloes around them.

Jeremy

I also think that the issue is in PP. Other than that, this is a very nice image…

[PhotoEcosse]

I have swapped the image for one taken earlier the same day. It doesn't have the blue sky unfortunately but maybe the light is more pleasing.

[Chairman Bill]

It certainly looks more natural than the first image you posted