yosemite and mono lake Pines at Sunset

excellent colours.

This shot was taken on CA 120 heading out of Yosemite NP. This one is

my consolation shot for missing fiery Horsetail Falls...here is the

story. I was in Yosemite on Feb 16, 17. One of my goals was to get a

decent shot of the Horsetail Falls during sunset. Feb 16th was a

partly cloudy day and most of the sun was blocked by the low clouds.

But during the end, when most folks had packed up, a faint ray

reached lower portions of the fall (other pic in this folder). I

hoped for a better 17th. Alas, 17th was fully cloudy the whole day in

the valley. Around 4:45 pm I was on my way out, decided to check out

Horsetail Falls once more, parked, but left in 2 min thinking its

been cloudy all day so no chance of it breaking up in the next 15 -

30 min. I couldn't be more wrong!!! Around 5, as I was out of the

valley area by now, the sky opened up. I was cursing myself for not

being patient, for not learning from yesterday. That lasted of 5

mins, then I started thinking about how to make the most of the

opportunity and kept an eye out for interesting foreground

silhouettes for a already stunning sky...and found this on the way.

 

Comments and critiques please. Anyone knows how to avoid the Jpeg

compression artifacts in the sky and still keep the image below 100K?

Lovely shot. The JPEG artifacts probably result from compression to 256 colour. Maybe it's something you have to accept for putting the image on the web with a small file size.