Take My Breath Away

Posted on June 3, 2011 | 8 comments

Wrapping up this week’s series on White Top Mountain is the second of a set of sunset photos; the first was yesterday’s post “Fountain of Fire“. Both of these were taken from locations in front of the bench we saw in “Waypoint KFC” to try and give the viewer an idea of what visitors see from this vantage point.

Like most everyone I’ve taken dozens of sunset photos over the years but, as I mentioned yesterday, these are the first HDR sunset images that I’ve ever processed. If I’ve learned anything from working on these images it’s that they are a little more difficult to get just right. Maybe it’s because I’ve never processed an image with such extreme ranges but they required a lot more work than I initially thought they would. I used a lot more brush work than normal in Lightroom adjusting saturation, brightness and contrast in different regions of the images trying to bring a balance between the foreground and the sky. I’ve also been using my trial of Topaz Adjust on all of these and learning a great deal about that product along the way.

I also realized that this was my first presentation that might be considered a series. I really have enjoyed the whole process – the image processing and the writing – and I hope you have too!

Camera settings: Canon 60D, Canon EF-S 18-135mm Lens, 18mm, ISO100, f/11, 9-brackets

Processing: Adobe Lightroom 3, Photomatix Pro, Topaz Adjust