Meramec River Sunrise

Kayaked up to this point to catch the sunrise. Meramec River is in

Missouri

Beautiful landscape, amazing tonality. Looks very impressive to me.

Regards.

Robert,

I like it!

Definately has a mood about it. I especially like how the viewer can still see details of the "depth" of the distant tree lines.

Very nice!

Regards,

Jim j.

Great mood here with Nice muted color.  I think I can see the humidity in the air.  You are aptly rewarded here for getting up early.   Larry

Yeah, tons of mood and atmosphere!

The radiating warmth and rising mist contrive to deliver those early morning moments that we all want to re-live.

Beautifully done!

I might be stating the obvious here, but there appears to be a tilt to the right?

Compliments & Best Regards

Alf

This was a good day for you -- you came back with more than one great photo.

I really like the atmosphere and especially the light.  How did you process this photo that is looking directly at the sun yet has good detail where it needs it (e.g., the reflections on the left side).  Also, this is among the best suns photographed with a digital camera that I've seen (i.e., it's not a series of concentric doughnuts) -- how did you accomplish that?  I'm impressed on technical as well as aesthetic levels.

Thank for all the comments. It took about an hour to paddle up the river to this point where it flows east-west so I could get the sun rising over the river. If the sky is  clear and it is windless overnight, there is always a layer of  mist on the river in the morning. It really is quite a calming experience to paddle through this mist.

The question as to whether there is a tilt is an interesting one. I used a level on the camera, so I suspect there is not a tilt. Also, if you look, the tree line is quite level. After taking lots of river photos I realize that the resulting photos often seem that they have a tilt. Our eye probably looks at the water line along the river bank to gauge the tilt. However, because of perspective, this line will only be horizontal if the water line is always a constant distance away. The banks of course are not at a constant distance. Sometime I crop the image so it looks as if there is not tilt even if there isn't.

Robert, this is spectacular.  Well worth the effort you took to get it.  As already stated, great composition, colors, and mood.  Well done.

Again, thanks for the comments. Stephen, the image is from a complex process that evolved.

Given the difficulty of including the direct sun, I first was conservative and shot some images with the sun just cut out from the top. Then I decide "what the heck, lets try including the sun", so I tilted the camera up slightly and shot some more. In each case I shot a number of images at different exposures which I combined in photomatix.  All images had bad flare present, which were especially enhanced with the HDR treatment.  However as the sun was at a different angle to the lens in the two sets of images, the flare was in difference places. At this point it struck me to overlay the two HDR images, line them up, and select the parts from each without the flare. This is why the image is square, the overlay of two offset images. 

Ok, at this point the flare was removed, but HDR does not do the direct sun very well. To correct this, I found one of the original images which included the sun where the rays were most clear, a little bit of blurring in the center and other artistic touches produced the desired solar image, which was overlayed with the previous result. Hope I explained this clear enough.

Robert, thanks for the explanation, and I think your work was excellent.  It's hard to see all of that work, and that's the mark of good work, IMO.