Fall reflection

sbarge

My first post - I stopped on the way home from work yesterday and took this picture. It was taken close to sundown near a pond on th HP campus in Fort Collins Colorado. Comments and suggestions are welcome! Thanks!
http://sbarge.smugmug.com

squirl033

gorgeous colors and reflection... sky's a bit bright, bit that's not a serious problem, and easy to correct with a grad ND filter.

coscorrosa

Welcome! That's a great subject (I'm psyched for Fall!), my only suggestion would be to wait for better light (front light closer to sunrise or sunset). The light above the horizon is significantly brighter than the light below, so you may want to use a graduated ND filter (if you have one), or blend multiple exposures in Photoshop.

sbarge

Thanks!
Thanks for the comments and suggestions!

Blue Snapshots

Hi neighbor

NIce reflection... nice photo. Didn't know that you could drive around the HP place. I try to get up to Ft. Collins a few times a year. Lots of great little places to go "with camera".

Thanks for sharin'

CatOne

squirl033 wrote:

gorgeous colors and reflection... sky's a bit bright, bit that's not a serious problem, and easy to correct with a grad ND filter.

IMO the light is excellent -- it's just catching the tops of the trees so you can't get much closer to sunrise or sunset than that

What I would have done though is shoot it with a 1-stop or 2-stop graduated ND filter. That would more closely balance the sky with the reflection in the lake (typically, a reflection loses about 2 stops of light).

All is not lost, though -- if this was shot in RAW you could run the same photo through ACR, and process it 1 or 2 stops differently and merge the 2 shots in Photoshop... that would work just fine. Marc's a pro at this.

sbarge

Thanks again!
Thanks again for the comments and suggestions. It sounds like I need to get a graduated ND filter! And I will try some additional postprocessing on my RAW image to correct the light on the horizon.