daverave

Thanks for the kind remarks, Chris, Pierre and Alf!

Damn jet trails ;-) I think you could crop out a lot of the sky and not lose a thing. The rocks make the image. Can you brighten the background mountain some?

Definitely a bit of clockwise rotation based on the trees. After leveling, I'd try cropping out the tree on the left, some sky, and the bit of FG granite in the lower right corner since all of the interest is in the center of the image.

Simply spectacular!

I might try brightening the top of the peak a bit but otherwise a very calming and evocative image.

Nice image... possibly a bit over-magenta-ed for my tastes but that's in the eyes of the artist. The Sierra need more clouds and snow!

The wind was really howling this evening in Death Valley. Our tent was

collapsing and held down with the largest rocks we could carry. You

can see the dust being blown in the valley below here. Not much

sleep... despite all that, a nice sunset on the Black Mountains in the

distance.

That looks great, Tony, but the amount of lightness is certainly the artist's decision to make. I could see it either way but I will say that your PS tutorial work certainly paid dividends.

I see what you're saying, Tony, but perhaps it's the color of the in-focus blade that I find distracting. Maybe if it was blue/cyan then it would be better. Just a thought...

The image really conveys what it must have felt like to have been there. Nice leading line to the sunrise formed by the lakeshore.

I could see this being just a bit brighter but that's just one opinion.  I wouldn't want to lose the pre-dawn feeling. It would be good if you could clone or crop out that bit of orphaned vegetation on the left side at the ridge line.

A nice minimalist image. I agree with Trisha though, this would work just as well, if not better, without the front twig. Either that or clone a few more of them ;-)

The black and white version of this truly evokes the essence of photography. Beautiful work, Tony.

Tony: This is one of my "secret" Sierra Nevada locations that I plan to go back to frequently for the rest of my life. I've never seen anyone else here and there are tons of photographic possibilities but I've yet to really nail the essence of the place. That's what I love about photography!

Thanks as always for commenting...

Thanks for the comment, Tony! I'm glad you posted your alternative processing as I sometimes wonder about the white balance on these shots. Part of me wants to do what you posted as that is what my eye sees but I've also read that the eye is actually "wrong" and that the camera renders shade truer. Ian Plant on his Dreamscapes blog has written about this. See:

http://www.ianplant.com/blog/2012/12/17/understanding-and-selecting-the-best-white-balance/

For this shot I liked the blue in the sky-reflecting shade with the yellow rocks in the light but other times I might like a version like you posted. I tend to vacillate between the two approaches for no particular reason.

Thanks for all of the comments you made last month. I've been away from PNet for a few weeks but hope to post some new work soon.

Hi Siegfried,

This was actually in the wild and a very exciting encounter indeed. It was right by the side of a trail in a national park and for a while my wife and I were the only ones there. We got within a few meters of it. Then another group of hikers came up the trail, making a lot of noise, and the sloth slowly climbed up a tree and into the canopy. His little trip took quite a few minutes and he lived up to his reputation.

Thanks for commenting.

Dave

Love the rich reds and blacks!

I like this one too.

This is my favorite in this very cool series maybe because I'm an architect but they are all interesting. The lack of people make it look just like a model.

That's a keen eye Svend, I do normally try to stick to the camera's inherent 2x3 image ratio even when I crop a photo. I'm not sure when or why I started doing that and I do the occasional square format. It may be a habit I picked up reading comments at naturephotographers.net but I sometimes wonder if it is one of those rules that should be broken.

Thanks again for commenting, I appreciate anyone that takes the time to do so.

I've never noticed that before but it would be a fun challenge to seamlessly repair it with other bits of seaweed in photoshop! thanks for commenting, Svend.

Excellent self-portrait, Svend, although I can tell from your portfolio that you are not usually very grumpy, just Danish (or Swedish? ;-)

Thank you Svend. I've never seen clouds like these before but I guess NZ is a good place to see unusual weather.

This image seems like it would be a natural for a B+W treatment.

Everything looks good to me: color, light, contrast are all very well done. Very minor suggestion would be to clone out that tiny bit of light in the URC.

Thanks for commenting, Alf!

f/25 sounds like operator error ;-) Fortunately sharpness isn't much of an issue on the web at this size.