Arizona Sunrise - C&C, please!

[Hartley]

Hi Y'all,

I would like to get comments on this view of a recent sunrise, taken from our cabin south of Prescott, AZ. While I've been taking pictures since before a lot of you were born, I've never taken any classes and I just shoot at things that look nice to me.. I am a real noob at this Internet photo sharing thing, so I hope I get this right..

I cropped this to fit on my desktop - I got tired of Vista making a mess of my normal-size pictures . I slightly tweaked the color temp and saturation using Elements - my memory sez this is what it looked like to my eye.
The mountains here are between 55 and 65 miles away, incidentally.

Hartley

 

[tirediron]

Nicely done - I suspect that this image could have been even better with the use of a graduated neutral-density filter and perhaps an orange filter as well.

 

[icassell]

I like it very much. I would be inclined to crop some of the black off the bottom and some of the very top of the sky (but that's me).

 

[Hartley]

Thanks to both of you for your kind comments!

tirediron, I understand the use of a neutral-density filter to even out the levels between the bright sky and the dark land below (at least, I think that's what it would be used for here..)

Would it look better with some details of the near ridge visible? (I looked at the original, and it can be done) Since I have a raw version of the original (.CR2) I can do all sorts of things with it, of course.. not all of which look "real"..

I also tried some similar ones as 3-shot HDRs, but the noise overcame the usefulness pretty quickly. It seems that sunrise & sunset with HDR make trouble with noise, at least for me (I use FDRTools).

Thanks Again!

Hartley