This digital image comes form a small pond in the Berkshire’s of Western Massachusetts. I have traveled back to this site to see what type of sunrise the day will offer. It always changes, and the colors, shadows, fog and reflections, can befuddle the camera and operator, so I come out to the lake to get challenged.
The mountains here are strongly backlit so you really don’t get much in the way of shadows, they are very weak. The earth colors are monotone, but the sky can be anything but….The sun actually comes up from behind on the third windmill, so the sky starts to really brightens up, then the sun appears, about thirty minutes behind schedule..
Then Bam.… everything gets lit real quick in a strong light. The pond sucks up a full stop of light. and the poor meter system gets all clogged up and tends to underexpose…Like I said it’s a good place to practice and see what you and your camera are capable of in different mode settings. Here, I am in manual mode, I’m leaning on the aperture side, picture control is vivid, I usually set my WB at A4 for sunrises but I went the other way and set for Blues at B5. (If you own a Nikon D3, you simple press the WB button and command dal rotate for red(warm) or blue(cool) color contrast.) I am on the gitzo, and today I set up for five shot bracketing.
In the digital darkroom, I took three of the images and sent them thru photomax, and brought the layer into CS5, I put a black mask on the layer and reveled only the mountains and fog to get the shadow detail back into the image. I used two other photos for my base image, using the extended tonal dynamic range process, that gets me real pixels in my Image, and not HDR.
Finally, I used a few plug-ins to help put some color contrast in the image, I have also been working with the Adobe Oil-paint and decided to give the sky a textured treatment..and I’m finished….There are some areas that I’d like to improve on, and that is the fun and journey, to be continue ….
