Week 9
Trying not to be lazy this week and just paste in the comment from the Flickr upload, but then last weeks posts were a bit of an afterthought.
This weeks shot was opportunistic, and was a backup backup shot, just incase the snowdrop pictures I had planned didn't work out. I'm over snowdrops now, they're boring. It's going to take something special for me to bother with them again, as the shots just look boring. So when reviewing the days shots in Lightroom 3 when I got home, my mood quickly began to turn as I realised there was nothing I wanted to use for this weeks shot. As I'd only taken 3 shots of the sky before jumping back in the car to go find the snowdrops, I wasn't expecting much. But when I opened up the image in Photoshop to play with the levels I realised I was on to something.
Because the shot was two thirds sky the exposure had pretty much turned the ground black, so there was nothing much to loose there. So I concentrated on the sky and gave a heavy bias towards black. I then tweaked the mid-tones to bring out the different greys in the clouds, then back into lightroom for a saturation adjustment to enhance the pinks on the horizon.
I'm normally a slave to the standard as-shot aspect, but I decided to be brave and crop the image to exclude all the black foreground and the now black sky above the break in the clouds. Part of my reason for doing this was to make it stand out when posted to a group on Flickr, but the main reason was purely that I thought it looked good that way and wanted to try something new. There was a breif experiment with a square crop that included the ground and sky, leaving the detail as a horizontal band in the middle of the image. It didn't stand out to me and so I ditched it in favour of my original crop.
