Clouds at sunset, New Mexico, USA

This image was rescued from my transparency files and scanned

recently. Any comments are appreciated!

Love the clouds here Jeremy. I like this better than my own sunset that I submitted tonite...

Bill G

Thanks for the comments! Angelo, I promise that other than a quick color correction to match the slide, there isn't any post-processing or image manipulation. It's virtually a straight slide scan. The original has slightly more contrast and saturation and is a little brighter, especially in lower clouds, but they're very close.

The clouds were a little brighter in reality than what you see here. To prevent them from being too bright and to make sure the mountain was a silhouette, I spot metered the bright yellow clouds in the saddle of the mountain and set the exposure to +1 stop. That held detail and saturation in the clouds and dropped the hills to deep black.

An interesting side note, this was shot on the NWR at Bosque Del Apache. There were a lot of other photographers there to shoot the birds, but they were all looking the other way. When the sun dropped behind the mountain and the light on the birds went away, everyone put away their cameras! Of the 25 or so people that were there with cameras, my dad and I were the only ones who didn't pack up and drive away without a second thought!