Farm near the Blue Ridge Parkway, Virginia - please view "larger"

How about this one? Also taken along the Blue Ridge Parkway in Virginia. It's a wonderful drive. Scenes like this were plentiful. The sky bothered me a bit. What are your thoughts?

Any comments or ratings are appreciated! :-)

It looks like a beautiful place, Lou Ann. Did you try getting down low and shooting though between the lower fence wires? I think this might be stronger if the fence were out of the shot.

A fine shot that is well balanced compositionally. The light is fine but would prefer something earlier in the day or later in the day - something not always possible when you are sightseeing. You have observed the rule of thirds where the sky in this instance occupies 1/3 and the land 2/3rds. I like the balance brought on by the 2 posts. The sky? - H-m-m-m! To be honest, I prefer them to be a bit more dominant and I am wondering if the combination of a polarizer and some PS post processing would have brought it out a bit more. I think I see a slight magenta bias which a small color balance would 'correct'.

At least, on the bright side, it has not drawn any anon 3/3 ratings like some of my images seem to do.

I have made some adjustments with Photoshop CS with Image/Adjust/Shadow_Highlight and then used the Levels eyedropper gray finder on the the post which changed the color balance of the photo. I then cropped the right side to make the posts almost equidistant from their corresponding edges. You may or may not like the final result but here it is:

You're right about the magenta cast, Tony - I like what you did. The funny thing is that the post that you see took considerable work on the sky to achieve in the first place. It really was quite washed out, so I selected it and pulled and pulled on the blues and contrasts until I got it this far. Still learning.....

The shadow_highlight command is a really remarkable set that is invaluable to us photographers. You can google "photoshop tutorial shadow highlight" and I am sure you can find something to provide more learning. Glad you found my version to be of interest. I am always a bit reluctant to 'mess' with someone's masterpiece but I do it in the interest of sharing - not that mine is better but to show something different. Have a nice day.

 

Tony - you have my across-the-board permission to "work with" ANY of my images at any time you want to. In fact, if you want, I can e-mail you a full-sized original version of an image ... if you really get jazzed about the idea of working with one. Just let me know if the inspiration to do that every inspires you. Meanwhile, have fun ... it helps me learn more and more as I see what other photogs would do with my stuff! :-)