Haybale sunset

Great shot. How did you determine how much ND to use? Did you take spot readings to ascertain exposure difference? I ask because I've just got a Pentax spot meter and this is exactly t what I would expect to need it for.

On the colour, for me, the forground looks a little magenta. If it were mine I'd probably want to adjust the colours a bit. Just my feeling - doesn't alter what is great reward for some real application of photograhic skills, well done.

Hi Nigel. Thank you for your comments. Absolutely right the difference between the sky and the field was seven stops. I made the sky one stop brighter than mid tone and the field one stop darker. (I use a Pentax spot meter) Combining a two and three stop ND grad filter took care of the difference and reduced my exposure time to two minutes. Velvia suffers from a colour shift towards magenta when exposures exceed ten seconds. Never-the-less I find the effect quite pleasing and resisted the urge to correct in photoshop.

Simply stunning.

Very gooooood, 6/6

I agree Ian, final effect is absolutely outstanding! It looks like one of blur filter from PS (probably the motion blur) but further better! Simply idea, perfect exposure, stunning coloured sky, what to want more? Congratulations

sooo smooth.great shot,congrats!!

Eduard Muench "The Scream" comes to mind.

Nice looking shot but to be honest, a bit far streched in PS in my humble opinion. I see many photo's that have been PS'ed beyond reality and look unrealistic. Thats just my personal preference.

I would love this photo if it were photorealistic

Wow, this is an incredible shot. I'll bet it would be spectacular printed large. Great moment, and good job technically holding detail in both the sky and foreground in what sounds like a very difficult capture.

David, read the comments above. This amazing image wasn't stretched too far in PS - in fact, it wasn't stretched at all! It saddens me that people view a truly wonderful photo like this one and immediately respond that it was PS'ed, or too much PS etc. That is probably the biggest single thing that I have against PS.

 

Ian, this is great. Thank you for the detailed description of how you went about capturing this keeper. Regards. JH

Thank you JH De Beer. You have answered the above recent comments. I am sick and tired of trying to defend this image. There is NO digital manipulation to this image other than to ensure that the colours, contrast and density as near as dammit match the Velvia transparency as viewed on a daylight calibrated light box. You can choose to believe it or not. I for one cannot be bothered with ars**ing around in photoshop I have better things to do with my life.

OK, then let me rephrase, i don't like the pic because it looks unrealistic. One would never see this image with the naked eye. If you didn't achieve this in PS then my apologies. But, using ND filters to this extreme is your taste, not mine. Still a fantastic pic but just not my taste.

That's fine David nobody can argue with someones preferences for a shot. The intention was to make the balance of light similar to what the eye sees and that necessitated the use of 5 stops of graduation as I could quite clearly see the straw bales and also the rich red colouring of the sky. The long exposure was of course forced on me and I hadn't fully appreciated the result. For me it greatly surpassed my expectations. I think my real point was that this was taken in one instant of time, albeit that instant lasted several minutes. It was not as some people have suggested created in some ghastly amalgam of photoshop, it really happened.

Wow, amazing picture. I'm just getting into landscape photography, and have a few technical questions.

What was your 'middle' tone that you metered off? Did you meter the foreground as middle and then subtract a stop from that reading, to 'place' it one under?

And for the sky, did you spot off the brightest part, or somewhere else?

cheers

Hi James sorry for not getting back to you I only just found your comment. You have almost answered the question yourself. I metered off the foreground with a separate spot meter and placed it at -1 stop that made it dark but with detail. I metered thebrightest bit of sky and made that + 1.5 stops to retain some sky details. noted the difference btetween the two which was as previously indicated ridiculously high and then used the 5 stops of graduation over the sky to field junction to reduce this difference to approx 3.5 to 4 stops. Hope that helps. Of course ther was also the problem that while I was exposing the film it was still getting darker so an element of luck has crept into the equation.