C&C same sunrise shot, few minutes apart, which do you prefer?

[fjrabon]

I know I've been hammering you guys on the sunrise C&C's lately, but I guess it's kind of evolved into a theme for me, as overdone as it is. Though I guess there are worse themes out there to be stuck on than sunrises. I swear I'll shoot something different sometime this week.

1. pre-sunrise


DSC_0025 by franklinrabon, on Flickr

2. right at sunrise


DSC_0044 by franklinrabon, on Flickr

The only difference between the two is 15 minutes, one click of exposure compensation, and the 2nd was cropped to remove some of the dead black space at the bottom. First image, pretty much all the light was reflected off the sky, hence the red glow to everything. 2nd image you get a mix of direct sunlight and reflected sunlight. I added a bit of contrast, and a really small amount of saturation to them, but I added the same exact amount to both.

Both were shot at 18mm with the Nikon intro level kit lens (all the talk about the kit lens the other day made me want to dust it off and snap a few with it). Both shots used a CPL filter as well.

Any comments and critiques on any aspects of either image are more than welcome.

 

[LightSpeed]

I prefer number 2.
I have no reason why. It's just more visually appealing to me.
It's also absent of the small dots of light in the foreground.

 

[fjrabon]

I prefer number 2.
I have no reason why. It's just more visually appealing to me.
It's also absent of the small dots of light in the foreground.

yeah, I wasn't sure if I should remove the small white dots (which are lights outside people's houses in the distance, by the way) or not. They're in the second image too, just less noticeable, since the light from the sun started drowning them out.

Also, for whatever reason, the version I'm staring at in Aperture of the first picture is noticeably lighter than the flickr version. I have no idea why flickr does that from time to time when it converts them to web images from Aperture (or perhaps Aperture does it when converting them to web images for flickr, who knows?)

 

[newer0]

I personally like the first one, more colorful to me. But the contrast is not as clear as the second one. How did you get the green color in the first one?

But I am just a beginner, may not be right.

 

[fjrabon]

I personally like the first one, more colorful to me. But the contrast is not as clear as the second one. How did you get the green color in the first one?

But I am just a beginner, may not be right.

TO be honest, I have no idea where the green sky came from. It's there in the raw image as well. I couldn't really believe it until I stuck the pixel color meter thingy over it in Aperture and it read out green. I guess it is something to do with the way the light was refracting off the sky and clouds?

The differences in contrast are purely differences in amounts of light. The ambient light level when I took the second was probably 10X what it was in the first. In the first it was nearly dark outside, just a little bit of light that was reflecting off the clouds. In the second it was clearly daylight outside.

 

[Pau1]

#1 has better color, but the house lights and foreground are distracting. #2 is nicer because the foreground is nice and dark.

 

[fjrabon]

Here's another from the same series. It might have some of what people liked in both.


DSC_0028 by franklinrabon, on Flickr

 

[D-B-J]

The first one maintains the detail in the tree, and thats definitely my favorite.

 

[zbo2408]

#1 mainly for the texture of the clouds