nantucket landscapes Madaket Moonset over Pond -- 1

Moonset at dawn. Sun is rising behind me while the full moon begins

its descent. First in a series of three. The other two are

href="http://photo.net/photodb/photo?photo_id=6509820">here

and

here.

Comments and critiques welcome. Cheers, Bill.

Superb image. The reflection of the moon is lovely.

Great job, Bill. This is a really nice scene. I bet this looks even better printed large - it is harder to appreciate the smaller elements of this scene in a small web presentation.

This is a very nice photograph. Good work.

Colors are lovely and the reflection is perfect great shot.

I like the stillness of the photo, so peaceful, I would crop the bottom part. I have attached my version.

Thanks to everyone for your comments and kind thoughts.

The crop is an obvious question and makes for a different composition than originally planned. My visualization included using a GND filter to get more details in the foreground grass and pond surface. As you can see in the third image in this series, I was fighting the fog and condensation on the lens/filter was a real issue. I had to clean the filter about five times before I realized that it just was not going to be usable so I made the image with no filter (the lens cap was on and off for just a few seconds which did not allow for condensation) and planned to recover details later in post processing. There is just not much there.

The final visualization for this scene is to be a triptych showing the change in moods and lighting as the sun rises/moon sets. In that presentation I plan to crop them all (consistent with Javed's suggestion) and place then vertically on top of each other.

Thanks to all,

~Bill

 

Hi Bill. Thanks for the analysis. I agree with your decisions. Part of what makes these interesting as a standalone piece is the process of discovering the bottom grass. The eye naturally skips over this detail, but after enjoying the distant scene there is a want for more. Discovering the grass hidden in the darkness gives a subtle complexity. I think it works in all 3, but a bit better in #2 with the last light of sun. In that one there is an even greater separation between foreground and distant scene.

100% crop of 1100 dpi scan. This is about 450 feet away.

The triptych's a good idea Bill as I'd be hard pressed to pick a winner here. I agree with your 2:1 crop and was going to suggest exactly that on one of the other versions but after looking at this one, I think you could bring out a tad more detail in the grasses, doesn't need much, and you'd have a very interesting image. Perhaps just some local sharpening (say Amount=15, Radius=50, Threshold=0).

This is a gorgeous landscape. As you'd expect from an 8X10 on Velvia 50, it's incredibly sharp and the colors are beautiful.

I like this one best. It is the most crisp of the three. Great series.

Beautiful piece, extremely sharp! Thanks for sharing.