What the $*%@ am I doing wrong

Sometimes, all it takes is getting the exposure right! Well done! All it needs now is a little punch in color and contrast and you're set.

Yep that looks great. If you could have stayed a few more minutes the light would have started to drop rapidly and you would have been up to F8 @ 30 seconds. But that is 100x improvement over the first picture.

2nd pic looks a lot better.

it is a lot easier to recover an underexposed photo than it is to recover a blown out sky. i always aim for underexposing.

loganz wrote in post #8879508
2nd pic looks a lot better.

it is a lot easier to recover an underexposed photo than it is to recover a blown out sky. i always aim for underexposing.

Good recipe for noise in the shadow areas...

Thanx everybody.
Yeah I will try to go back but like I said, it closes early and gets dark very quickly and there are no lights. I'll have to bring a flashlight next time as I did not have one last night. Should be better colors next week anyway.

I couldn't do anything in DPP without losing the sky. Here is another shot of the same scene, 6 minutes earlier. I did a little DPP to it. Not sure it looks good. Let me know what I can do or didn't do right. Thanx.
Shutter Speed- 10
Aperture- f8.0
ISO- 100
Focal length- 35mm

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reelfinatic wrote in post #8882030
I couldn't do anything in DPP without losing the sky.

This is where exposure blending in photoshop can help.