Yesterday was cold and rainy, but in the evening the sun came out and painted the mountains red. I saw it in time, took the Sigma 150/2.8 and made a series of images.
I have four versions here. The three above are in temporal order, the Image of the Day was actually the last taken. The first image is slightly different in color temperature and contrasts. At that time the light was much brighter, but after normalization for a well distributed histogram its sky looks much darker.
Btw, yesterday I said that it’s a mistake to always “fill” the histogram and that’s still true in cases where you have naturally low contrast, i.e. where you have to spread the tonal values. A cloudy sky is a good example. Have you ever seen parts of the sky get pure black? Well, I haven’t, at least not during the day. Pure white is OK as long as it is in the sun. Pure white in the clouds looks bad most of the time though. But black? Never.
In scenes like this sun-lit mountain, the natural contrast is extremely high. Here it is not a question of spreading tonal values, here it is a question of achieving a high tonal range and of distributing the tones in a way that makes contrasts look natural (as opposed to most HDR atrocities).
Anyway. Of course this is just my way of thinking about it and you are in no way required to heed my advice 🙂
The Song of the Day is “One And The Same” from the 2000 Everlast album “Eat at Whitey’s”. Hear it on YouTube.