Horseshoe Bend - my latest

My latest from Horseshoe Bend. I'd love to hear what you think of the shot. could I have done anything better?

(click for larger version)

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Very cool ..

I'm not sure what else you could have done other than a grad ND on that right side sky. But that's it! Nit picking at this point.
Did you have to hike a bit to get to that spot?

It looks like HDR, is it?

Thanks guys. Nope, not an HDR. I used a grad ND on the entire sky and did a 5 shot pano. The right side is so light because the huge rain cloud on the left just passed through and left a clearing on the right. I also underexposed it by 1/3-2/3 a stop.

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From the centre to the right side of the sky it's a bit overexposed, but it's not bad.

I like the symmetry in the composition here, but I would clone out the left-top most rock "bump", or crop the image to get rid of that.

I'm not sure if there is enough to work with here, but if you can what I would do is bring up the brightness on the foliage/trees around the river bank and add some more saturation too. It would give the photo some more pop and add some contrast down there. Not sure if others, or yourself would like this, but for me personally I think that would be wicked.

I highly doubt the photo is tilted, but it feels like it is. Maybe it's just the geometry of the rocks, but when I look at this I feel like it's tilting down to the right a bit.

Anyways, despite all of these I still think this is a great photo and well worth the effort getting there. Great job.

I realise what a nightmare it must have been to expose for, with the shadows, sky variation and the bright rock in the foreground. I would have created two images from a single RAW and blended.

I do like it though.

In answer to your question, no, and as for what i think,i love it. Certainly one of the best horse shoe photographs that i have seen, really great!

Nope. It's a good one.

Great shot Beachbum. I like it the way it is. The sky on the right looks fine to me and not blown out (EIZO monitor). A great example of using a GND at the right time. Blending would be a good option but, who wants to PP for 30 minutes as oppose to 2 minutes?

awesome shot!!

Looks great. Makes me wish I'd had more time to go see that a couple weeks ago when I went past there.

I think you might also be the guy I met at the antelope canyon tour???

jdizzle wrote in post #8692569
Great shot Beachbum. I like it the way it is. The sky on the right looks fine to me and not blown out (EIZO monitor). A great example of using a GND at the right time. Blending would be a good option but, who wants to PP for 30 minutes as oppose to 2 minutes?

It takes you 30 minutes to blend in another exposure? I can do it in under 2 minutes, as I would imagine a lot of other people can as well.

Thanks for the compliments guys.

And honestly, I didn't want to do any blending. I'm a photographer, not a photoshopper. If that's what the sky looked like that night, I did the best I could with the weather and equipment I had. To me, and this is my opinion only, had I blended/cloned in a second image, I would look at my final photo as it not being the real thing. I'm more proud of the photo i TOOK, not CREATED.

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Just a note: blending only compensates for the limitations of the sensor to create something more like what the eye actually saw. At least that should be the intention.

It's effectively the same as using a grad ND, except you have more control over where to apply the corrections (not just the sky), and to what extent.

I think people are put off by it mainly because it's so time consuming.