Stragglers

I don’t know what’s wrong with  me that I just don’t finish processing stuff before posting. I’m a nut. These are from the Mt. Foss sunset session.

By now you know I have a fern habit and when I saw these I knew I had to try to work with them. I’m not 100% sold on this, but I was trying to work fast with the light that I had. I wanted them back-lit and I like the glowing aspect, but the sun isn’t in a great position. Moving though, gave me a lot of lens flare. It was too distracting, so I went with this offset sun instead. It’s handheld at ISO 500 and since I wanted those rays coming from the sun, it’s stopped down to f13. I wasn’t sure it would be enough, since this is a new lens, but I took a chance and it worked. In order to get those in your shots, that kind of star effect, you need to close the aperture down.

Usually the most color in a sunset happens after the sun sinks down past the horizon. I learned the hard way that sometimes the color takes a while to develop. The old adage “don’t pack until it’s black” is right on. If you have to hike back to your car in the dark, do it. Bring a headlamp or a flashlight and stay until you can’t see. It’s the only way to make sure you get the most out of the sunset. In the field I used an 8-stop graduated neutral density filter. I still use them because I think it helps me control the light better in-camera. In processing this one, I did notch the saturation up a bit (I think 15 on the sliders) and the luminance on the green and yellow channels, too, just to highlight that spectacular new foliage. I think it gives some much-needed depth in the foreground.

Anyway…sorry for the extra post. Sometimes I’m like a runaway train.