Twilight Madison Shoreline

[crimbfighter]

I finally had a little time to try and get a couple images of the Madison shoreline at twilight. The weather the last several days has included warmth, rain, and freezing, which created a nice shinny ice layer over the lake as opposed to it being snow covered. I was hoping it would make for some nice reflections. I feel like something in the processing isn't quite there, but I can't put my finger on it. The light changed very rapidly and these three images were taken over the course of about 30 minutes, which is why the light and color changes so much.

1. D800, 85mm f/1.8 @ f/10, 0.8 sec, ISO100


2. D800, 85mm f/1.8 @ f/10, 1.6 sec, ISO100, 6 shot pano


3. D800, 70-200 f/2.8 VRI @ f/10, 155mm, 6 sec, ISO 100

 

[SquarePeg]

Probably the actual light and not the processing but in the first one the buildings appear too blue, IMO. 2nd shot buildings appear less blue but hard to tell if this is sharp without viewing larger version which I wasn't able to do as is private on Flickr. Last one is the best of these for me. I would get rid of some of the plain sky at the top and make it a 16:9 or similar.

 

[crimbfighter]

Probably the actual light and not the processing but in the first one the buildings appear too blue, IMO. 2nd shot buildings appear less blue but hard to tell if this is sharp without viewing larger version which I wasn't able to do as is private on Flickr. Last one is the best of these for me. I would get rid of some of the plain sky at the top and make it a 16:9 or similar.

Thanks for the suggestions! After you mentioned it, I went back and looked again at the colors of the buildings on #1 and I agree, they were too blue. I made some selective edits to adjust the WB of the buildings to tone that down. The second one is sharp, but the file I originally uploaded isn't the largest, so it pixelated quickly. The full rez RAW file is over 400 mb, so I didn't want to upload a gigantic file. I updated the original post with a larger file to better see the detail. I also tried a 16:9 crop on the third one which worked well.

Here is #1 with the color balance adjusted a bit. I couldn't go too drastic, but a subtle change definitely helped.

 

[WesternGuy]

These are nice images - good exposure and sharpness. Since there is no detail in the sky in any of the images, I would be tempted to reduce the amount of the sky to about one-third of the image from the approximately half that it occupies now.

WesternGuy