Painted Storm

This past June I spent a day at Oregon's Painted Hills. It was grey

and cloudy almost the whole day. But, around 6:00pm there was a brief

break between cloud fronts and the grey blanket broke into a colourful

patchwork.

 

All comments are welcome -- especially any suggestions for improvement.

 

P.S. The reds seem to have lost some vibrancy between my work file and

here.

VERY nice! 7/7a

It's an interesting sky but not quite as interesting as those amazing hills. I would prefer more earth and less sky, perhaps a closer view point. It's still a good shot though, that little tree on the horizon is a surreal touch.

 

Simon

 

P.S. I presume you got the right colour profile, I have forgotten to change it a couple of times. The reds always seem to suffer most.

 

 

Thanks.

 

Simon, thanks for your comments on this and the other Painted Hill's shot today. You might have a point about the sky/earth balance. The parks people have put a fence across the whole bottom view of this formation to stop hikers walking into the formation. Part of the choice of composition was because I was forced to shoot over the top of the fence.

 

So, I'll see if there is a crop off of top and right that would tighten this. I might have tried that is the field too on another frame -- but, this more open cloud pattern only last about 25-30 seconds and made my choice of which to process fairly easy.

 

This is indeed sRBG. It just seemed to get duller in the reds between exporting from Lightroom and framing it in CS3.

 

P.S. I have some very tight (i.e. no sky) compositions yet to come.

 

 

That sky is is so beautiful that I would have a hard time cropping it. Your processing of the sky is very well done as your tonal values just abound. An overall wonderful piece of eye candy!

A few years ago the parks people would give photographers permission to crawl under the fence and wander closer to the hills, providing they stayed off the clay so as to not leave any footprints. IMO, they should formalize this, charge a (small) fee, and give the photographer a big identifying mark so that other park visitors would know it's not a free-for-all.

Yes, like the pre-opening access to White Sands has finally become (more-or-less) formalized.

 

Anyways, I was there mid-June, mid-week. There were no parks people at all and only two other sets of visitors the whole day. So, even if there was such a policy I couldn't have partaked of it.

 

Of the two other groups, one of those was a pair of hobbyist photographers from British Columbia who'd just come from a workshop in the Willamette's with some female landscape photographer whose name didn't stick in my mind. There were a very nice couple. I wish we'd traded names, I'd like to see what images they got -- he was working on detail shots from under the covered area with the information plaques with a VERY long lens (500mm?).