A View To The City From The Mountain

This picture is from one hell of a walk in the mountain with temperature

below zero and without a path through the trees... But it was worth it.

Thanks for the opinions in advance... Please view Larger

I feel guilty for suggesting anything different, after what you went through to get the photo.  However, I personally feel the best thing about photography is experiencing the landscape, and you really got to do that.

I sense you may have applied HDR here, as a halo is pretty evident on the left.  I can imagine the range of light you would have faced here as well, and the far background is well-exposed as is the depth of the ravine.  My two wishes are 1) for the city to be more recognizable as a city, and 2) for the OOF rocks in the lower right corner to be addressed.  Frankly, if I had been standing on this spot, I'm not sure what I would have done.  I might have said to myself there's no way to get detail in the city so far away and have these nice frost-covered bushes in the frame at the same time.  I might have zoomed past the shrubs, but keep the frost- and shrub-covered hillsides in the distance, focusing more on them and the part of the city that is closest to them.  I'm not sure -- it's easy to be an arm-chair photographer; much more difficult when you're actually standing at the site in very cold weather after a difficult hike.

Thank you very much Stephen Penland for the comment and the attention!

I like your idea but it's little late now to apply it but I'll definitely keep it in mind next time when I'm shootin a scene like this. I wanted to get as much as I could of the scene and did not though of a close up of the city and the slopes near it. Thanks again for the idea!

By the way it's not a HDR

Deyan, my apologies on the incorrect assumption.  Actually, I was impressed that you got detail in all parts of the photo, even in areas that I would have expected to be either quite light or quite dark.  It may be the fairly heavy cloud cover that is giving you more uniform lighting, and I'm obviously seeing something else on the left.  Trust me, I have many sites on my own list that I want / need to revisit because some compositions just didn't occur to me until I returned home and reviewed my photos or until someone suggested another possibility.  I wish my eyes were wider open to other possibilities at the time, but that's unfortunately not the case with me.  So I keep returning.

I suppose everyone of us gets this feeling all the time. It's in our nature to want to develope our skills so it's perfectly normal :)

Best Wishes, Deyan!