Golden Mercy

Handheld shot of three sets, blended manually using advanced luminosity

masking technique: First three bracketed shots for far bg ( main by f/7.1,

1/125, ISO/250 ), second set for the sun ( main by f/22, 1/50, ISO/800 ),

and third set for fg ( manually stacked for focus, main shot by f/7.1, 1/160,

ISO/320 ). Location is rich farms of my city Bojnord ( Mehmanak ), North

Khorasan Province, Iran. Autumn 2013. Thank you in advance for your visit

and opinions.

Beautiful image Hamid, I especially like the detail in the foreground and its warm color in contrast to the cool colors of the sky.

Best,

Holger

Very beautiful and well composed image.... hard to make a stand out picture now days... but you've done it.

Paul

A really beautiful result with impressive lighting, Hamid!

Well lit and initially pretty image.  Your equipment lists a grad, but why did you use a grad when you have combined three images?  Also, I realize that you are trying to recreate what you saw, but the image lacks realism for me because it does look like a foreground and a background were pasted together.  I understand why you joined them with an f/22 sun shot as this f-stop creates better "sun stars" for some lenses.  And perhaps that is part of the unrealism as I would have expected to see a few sun beams in the lower half of the image.  Regards, Jeff   

Hamid,  Excellent image, although I might open the shadows in the very front more.  What strikes me about this image is that it is not anything like the arid desert land that westerners mentally picture as Iran.  I appreciate the education you offer here as well as the image itself.  Many thanks.  Larry

Thank you folks for nice comments and critiques. 

Jeff, I usually use grads and bracketed shots together, and use usually one middle shot as the main shot , combined with two others in minor regions if needed. I remove grad for sun series at f/22, avoiding flare. About realism: I think most photos with heavy work on luminosity lack realism , because we approach artistic view. Best realism exists in snapshots with compacts or mobile shots with is very near to what our eyes see, but with DSLRs we change the view a bit and try to include all the light burden into one shot. In other words, we avoid snap shots for a better artistic photo and with DSLRs we try to approach normally looking picture, but there always a distance between two.  In the shot with f/22, just the upper portion of the sun formed star beams, because of the sun position. Thank you for your feedback.

Larry: Iran is a vast four-season country, having forest, desert, sea and mountains in a distance just for few hours driving ( mostly in north ). Take a look at the iran landscapes in related fb page, please google best iranian landscape photographers ( pn do not allow links here! ).

My best regards, 

Hamid.

This could have been taken near my home except the wheat here is still green. Beautiful shot. Very well done!

Best,

Jim