Baie St Paul

[Manfred M]

Crepuscular light rays through the clouds, the rolling hills of the Charlevoix region of Quebec, Canada. The landscape was created some 325 - 350 million years ago when a 2 km / 1.2 mile diameter meteor came crashing down and formed a huge crater (54km / 34 miles in diameter).

The town itself with church steeples can be seen in this image. The lighting and the greenery result in an image that is almost monochromatic.




This image works best when enlarged in Lightbox. Just click on the image to pull up that view.

[Tronhard]

lovely cloud effects Manfred, and an interesting contextual comment to boot!

[tbob]

Quite brilliant.

Did you explore a crop, saving the lowest cloud layer , to reduce the impact of the blown out clouds? A different image without all the clouds but perhaps works

[Polar01]

Been thru there about 6 times in total beautiful part of the country.

Cheers: Allan

[NorthernFocus]

An interesting shot that needs to be viewed in the larger version to be appreciated. I agree with Trevor's suggestion that reducing some of the brightness at top might help.

[FootLoose]

Nice scene, Manfred. I think Trevor's suggestion is worth exploring and I also think you could consider cropping the foreground to above the creek. There is not a lot of interest down there and removing throws attention onto the township and the filtered light which is what the picture is about.

[Manfred M]

Thanks for all the comments.

The sky is already quite heavily cropped and toned down via a gradient in that part of the image. I found that this was the limit I could get to before the tonality in the sky starts to look a bit strange and unnatural (the sky was definitely not blown out in the original, but I don't know what the sRGB conversion did). I also tried cropping out the river, but found without it, the balance was not working with the bright sky and that bright band was needed.

I thought about cropping out the tree tops in the foreground, but I'm not sure if that is worth the effort.