Black Walnut Point- Experimenting with Nik plug ins

[Harpo]

Recent trip to Tilghman Island, MD. Initial image was too bland as there was alot of haze in the sky. First serious attempt at using the new Nik Plug ins I bought. Tried the filters in both Color Efex pro 4 & HDR Efex pro 2. While Im not that crazy about the HDR look, the image from HDR efex seemed to come out a little nicer? I just downloaded the guide on these plug ins from Jason Odell, so I have some learning and practicing to do.

Heres the first attempt at it. My thoughts are I should have used a smaller aperture to get the rock in the very front (left side) sharper. Thoughts?


Black Walnut Point Sunset by MikePhoto63, on Flickr

[shreds]

I like it.

Maybe the grass is a little saturated and you are right about the DoF for the rock.

Next time(?) I might be tempted to offset the sun to one side as that seems to be the main subject and putting it on a third to the left might also have precluded that long blade of grass sticking into the main area of the photo.

Love the clouds though.

Glad to see you are experimenting with the Nik plug ins. I do like them!

[Manfred M]

An interesting shot Mike and interesting application of post-processing. I find that perhaps the image is not balanced enough for my taste, with too much large and heavy gray rock in the image. It is just a giant mass that has taken over the bottom left part of the shot. I wonder if cropping a bit more tightly and moving your crop up to about the mid-point of the rock (from the bottom) might not result in a more balanced image.

I normally would have offset the sun a bit more so that it is not quite a centred, but with the cloud pattern just to the right of the sun, I think that adds enough asymmetry for the image to work.

[Harpo]

Thanks for the feedback. I went back to play with it more taking into consideration your suggestions. I agree with burning the grass a little bit helped. As for the composition, I now see what you mean Manfred after taking a break from the image and coming back to it… the boulder in the front is a big chunk! I also tried cropping out some of the rock and moving the sun closer to both sides of the third mark… the crop took out the impact of the clouds and sky too much. Looking at my other images of that same area, I can see which settings worked better than others and from what angle. Heck, the place is 3 hours away from me, so I think Im going to have to have a do over!

[Bobobird]

Overall it is a nice shot and a decent attempt at using the plugs.