Grand Teton - Clearing Storm

[Slobodan Blagojevic]

I posted this earlier in the Trees thread, but wanted to hear critique here as well. The shot is from 2007, so, obviously, I had some doubts about it. I reprocessed it recently (thanks god for Lightroom improvements over the years!), but were never happy with the composition. You see, the shot was a victim of a drive-by shooting, so to speak. The whole week spent in the park was drab, so I spent most of the time driving around on a recon mission, looking for future good spots. Every now and then, the sky would part and the sun would illuminate something interesting for a brief moment, then disappear again for another hour or so. When it happens, I had to look for a spot to stop the car and take a few shots. Very often, there was no time to even get out of the car, set the tripod up, etc., so I was shooting hand-held, through the rolled-down car window.

To my surprise, the shot got quite popular on Flickr (made it to the Explore list, more than 2K views the first day) and 500px. What say you?

Grand Teton - Clearing Storm by Slobodan Blagojevic, on Flickr

And another one, less popular, from the same occasion. I liked the natural contrast between the snow-covered evergreens in the shade, and bright, fall colors on the sunlit hill:

Grand Teton Trees by Slobodan Blagojevic, on Flickr

EDIT: #1 is now a revised version

[Harald L]

I like the second very much!

The foreground of the first one looks somewhat artificial to me ... like during a solar eclipse.

Harald

[RSL]

You shouldn't be surprised, Slobodan. The "Clearing Storm" shot is one of the best photographic mountain treatments I've seen. Since you removed the exif data I can't tell how long a lens you used, but since you were able to retain the feeling of the Tetons' height I'd guess it was pretty long. Most mountain photographs show the scene as it actually is, but very very few capture the real feeling.

A fine shot. Bravo!

[Slobodan Blagojevic]

... Since you removed the exif data I can't tell how long a lens you used, but since you were able to retain the feeling of the Tetons' height I'd guess it was pretty long...

I didn't, if you go to Flickr, it is all there. It must be Flickr's new design that makes it difficult to see where the exif is (a little circle with an "i" in it). Indeed, it was an equivalent of a 240mm lens.

[cjogo]

It's one of those shots > that makes me want to spend an hour in CS :: tweaking    Pretty amazing from the car window....

[Dave (Isle of Skye)]

Hi Slobodan,

Shot #1, I think the composition is spot on, but where the light range is so dynamically extreme between the bright colours of the harshly lit aspens and the muted blue haze of the much darker mountain behind, must have created a lot of CA and colour fringing along those edges, which I then assume you have removed with LR's lens correction tools. Nothing wrong with that, except LR (and PS) when used to tackle some of the more extreme CA problems these types of lighting conditions can create, do so by shifting the edges within the image over each other, a sort of overlapping of one edge with the other to hide the CA problem type of thing, which sometimes can work very well, but at other times can give a false sparkly look to the corrected edge - the tops of the trees seem (to me) to have this effect.

A quick cure I find and what I would normally do as the very last job on an image that has had these problems, is by using PS to duplicate the flattened background layer (Ctrl+J), then using a small soft brush under the blurring tool, gently paint some blur onto the top layer at about 5% along the hard edges until they blend back together more naturally, it doesn't need much to be effective, then either flatten the two layers (Ctrl+E) back into the final image again, or if you find you have gone a bit overboard with the blurring, experiment with the opacity between the two layers until it looks OK and then flatten the image.

Nature very rarely has sharp edges at a distance like this, but LR and PS can introduce that effect into a shot after major CA surgery.

Dave

[Slobodan Blagojevic]

... Nature very rarely has sharp edges at a distance like this, but LR and PS can introduce that effect into a shot after major CA surgery.

Thanks, Dave, you are right.

I noticed that halo as well, but thought it to be mostly due to jpeg/Flickr compression. So I went back and retraced the steps to find the culprit, and it is not CA, as the lens has very little of it (but I then eliminated ALL lens corrections anyway, as they always require pixel shifting). Most of it comes from the HSL sliders in LR. Every time you use those sliders, LR creates a mask, and when you have such a contrasting transition like here, both color and detail-wise, the mask becomes quite visible.

The other part was sharpening, so I changed that a bit as well. I think the result overall is better, with more 3-D separation (less cut-uot like).

Thanks again for the tips, Dave.

[Dave (Isle of Skye)]

Right you are Slobodan 

But the slight blur fix does work at a push if or when you don't want to go all the way back to the RAW.

Dave

[chuckn]

I have a technical question, on the first image where did you take your meter reading, on the sky or on the trees? Did you use a ND grad filter at all. Very nice by the way.

[seamus finn]

Me? I'm not interested in all that techno  babble, SB. It's all about the image. I don't care how you achieved it.

The first picture is a golden moment but I think there is too much foreground. Get rid of that gorse shit and make a dramatic, severe, low horizontal statement to emphasise what lies above which is, well, what it's all about. Maybe straighten the horizon a bit, even though there may have been a natural slope. Take some poetic licence here. Screw around with it in Lightroom, take a look at it in b/w and be amazed. If it was me, back in the day, I'd be shooting Kodak Infrared in that light, but that's another story

But that's only me, a street guy, talking out loud.

[luxborealis]

Both are beautifully seen and executed. Great work. Thanks for sharing the photos, the field context and the behind the scenes work.

[Slobodan Blagojevic]

I have a technical question, on the first image where did you take your meter reading, on the sky or on the trees? Did you use a ND grad filter at all...

If I were shooting film (slides), I would have metered on the trees. With modern, digital cameras, with matrix/evaluative metering systems, that is what I use, on Auto most of the time. In circumstances like those, I do not want to fiddle with menus, settings, etc. All I have to make sure is that the histogram does not show blown highlights, the rest is recoverable in post. And no, no ND grad. It was pretty much "point & shoot." Or, since that was in Wyoming, to use cowboy analogy: shoot first, ask questions later  

EDIT: I shall add that, in film days, I was an avid user of ND grads

[Slobodan Blagojevic]

... I think there is too much foreground. ... take a look at it in b/w and be amazed. If it was me, back in the day, I'd be shooting Kodak Infrared in that light...

Thanks for the suggestions, Seamus. Although I think that the foreground is necessary to anchor the heavy mountain, I shall be the last one to complain about playing in post, so here is a b&w and your suggested version as well:

[wolfnowl]

The first picture is a golden moment but I think there is too much foreground.

That was my first thought as well. The mountains and the light backlighting the trees, wonderful, but too much expanse of a rather boring, brown foreground. I would have preferred more sky, but how much can you get from a car window?  

Mike.

[RSL]

Never thought I'd disagree with Seamus or Mike, but I disagree with Seamus and Mike. Chopping off the foreground eliminates the feeling of distance. Maybe it's because I'm familiar with plenty of scenes like this one in real life, but for me that foreground is an important part of the picture. One of the delightful things about this picture is the way that sliver of sun catches the trees but avoids the foreground. The bright trees offset the storm over the mountains, but the mountains need a counterbalance in the foreground.

[David Eckels]

Lovely, lovely image. Maybe an intermediate approach to the f/g, but FWIW, the f/g doesn't bother me as much in the b/w version, but then it is only a very slight "bother."

[Eric Myrvaagnes]

I'm with Russ on this. The foreground is needed.
Very nice shots, both of them.

[William Walker]

The other part was sharpening, so I changed that a bit as well. I think the result overall is better, with more 3-D separation (less cut-uot like).

The first version certainly looked "crunchy" to me, otherwise lovely! (Nitpick!) The foreground being "crunchy" does not bother me, that vegetation, certainly in my experience, is normally brittle and "crunchy" anyway, and is not pleasant to walk through - so that feeling is conveyed by having the foreground sharpened the way you had it.

Those days where the sun and the clouds create pictures like this are great. It is perfect when this occurs and you just happen to be set up in the right place.

William

[stamper]

In the first image I think that there are two images in one here? The mountains in the background and the trees and gorse in the foreground. The top of the trees are almost in the center of the image so if you take about an inch of the bottom then there is a better balance? The colour difference between the foreground and the background is striking which makes it better than the second image which to me looks like it is a little desaturated. Thumbs up for the first image but undecided on the second.

[Hans Kruse]

I like the first picture and as you say this happens in nature often that a situation occurs and you have to get the shot. Sometimes it is worth while to take the shot and walk to a location that might be better and wait there until the light comes back. It is my experience that it often does that in cloudy situations. But it does require patience that is not always what we have and especially if there is not time to wait for e.g. an hour.

The second picture does not appeal quite so much to me. It's a nice picture but it is missing something.

The first one is a bit flat and I took the liberty to take a screen shot and bring it into Lightroom and do a bit a editing and here is what I would suggest. I added contrast and cropped from the bottom a bit and also adjusted the light on the foreground below the trees to balance after the contrast adjustment using a grad filter. Maybe not your taste but I think it would come out stronger and more like what you would expect from the strong light on the trees. For me the composition works well and you could have included more sky but I like tight crops also.