Twilight Hour

[Jay.DeVries]

Twilight by Jay DeVries, on Flickr

 

[tirediron]

A little under-exposed and over-processed for my taste.

 

[Destin]

Agreed with tirediron's comments above. It's slightly under exposed for sure, there is zero detail in the trees, which are a huge part of the photo. I don't think they are interesting enough for silhouetting, so I think they could definitely use some detail. The sky appears somewhat underexposed and certainly over saturated for my taste. The human eye knows that sunsets are bright things to look at, so seeing one in a photo with no highlights visible tends to feel unnatural.

I don't know your level of experience, so I apologize if you already know the following:

If you're set on shooting just a single exposure, it's hard to capture the dynamic range we see in a scene like this. You'll always be compromising on one end or the other. Personally, I would shoot a scene like this as two or three separate exposures and then selectively blend them using luminosity masks in photo shop. This generally produces more realistic images when compared with automated HDR generating.

As an example, I shot this a few nights ago. The top two images were selectively blended to create the bottom one. Note that there is very little exposure or saturation adjustment on these, and other than some selective exposure adjustments to balance the exposure, these files are straight out of camera.

 

[Jay.DeVries]

I am going to have to give that a try! I have only been taking photos for about a month maybe. Still very new and open to ideas and help. Thank you very much!

 

[Jay.DeVries]

How do you do luminosity masks btw. never tried it.

 

[Destin]

But you'll need to shoot bracketed exposures with the intention of doing this.