Dark Sunset

Hi Larry, it's a beautiful scene with some gorgeous light on the clouds in the sky, and nice reflections too.
About your question, I would say that in scenes like this one, where the horizon line is not perfectly clear (you got branches and trees protunding over there) and particularly when you're shooting into the sun... well, GNDs are of little (if any) help.In this cases, it's much batter to exposure bracket at least three shots (5 is much better), separated by two stops and then playing with manual blending. If you have shot a RAW for this one, it's still possible for you at least bring out some more detail in the shadows, if this is what you're aiming to. Try to export another tiff from your RAW file overexposing it by, say, 1-1,5 stop, and then play with it as a second layer in photoshop placing it over your original tiff file. I cannot explain in details here how to proceed with a manual exposure blending in PS, but if you google it, you will certainly find tons of useful resources. From what I see, it will be much harder to recover some details in the highlight area, but this is not really a problem since you were shooting into the sun and it's pretty natural for that area to be blown out.

Good luck!
Paolo

Hi Larry. A classic example of a very difficult situation with the tonal range in the scene. It is okay as is. Your question about filters: a circular polarizer works best on scenes with side lighting, so no help here, where you are looking into the sun. I think Paolo probably has the best solution for you. Otherwise I might try: spot meter on a "neutral gray" tone in the scene, lock the exposure and take the shot; or bracket several shots and blend in post-processing. I'm going to guess a bit and disagree with Paolo, though, on using the gnd. Since the trees/branches are as black as the horizon area, it would seem to me that you could bring the grad line just into the horizon area and achieve some darkening of the sky. It would probably take a stack of gnd's to do this though! I have some shots I took in Grand Teton NP last Sept, where I faced a similar situation. It took 6 stops' worth of gnd's, and I should probably have stacked them a little differently than I did to average the gradient all the way down to where my horizon was. Anyway, there's gorgeous light in your image, especially in the sky.

Paolo,
I did bracket with 3 RAW. Photomatix processing really did not help if it manipulated stuff correctly.

This photo is the RAW neutral with only sharpening applied so you can appreciate how intense the color was. This small rendition does not really illustrate the color well.

I tired to lighten the dark areas but they became noisy quickly. I don't have PS but use Nikon's Capture NX2.

Perhaps PS does better in blending???

So, some photos with high contrast perhaps don't respond well.

I don't mind silhouettes but the trend to day is to go for high dynamic range. I think each photo should be judged for what each person likes and no general rule applied.

Thanks for your time to comment...

the fisch

Catherine,

I never thought about using the GND on stacked photos. Learned something.

Thanks,

the fisch