Venus in Predawn Arizona Sky

kdog

Don't ask me why I was on top of Mt Hualapai in Kingman, AZ at 4:45 AM yesterday. But there I was. That's venus as far as I know.



Actually, I was checking out the area. We're moving there in the next month or so. :nod

Regards,
-joel

kdog

Actually, I think I like it better cropped a bit.



Thanks for looking.
-joel

photon

Love the colours...
I like the colours, and good exposure to get the siloette of the tree. I'm a fan of combining celestial and terrestrial photography together, but it's hard to find a good foreground that complements (and doesn't overshadow) the stars/planets/moon etc.

I feel a bit uneasy because the horizon is tilting down on the left side (easily fixed). I would also have liked to have a better separation between Venus and the tree, which might have been accomplished by shooting from a slightly different angle. This would have given the picture better balance, which you partially accomplished doing the cropping (but in the cropped version the tree is much more prominent, which may confuse the viewer as to the actual subject you're trying to shoot). You can always move it in PS!

Thanks for posting.

(Oh yeah, and it's definitely Venus)

kdog

Thanks for the well constructed critques, Photon. You have a better eye than I. You may be correct that it would have been nice to have gotten some more space between the tree and venus. Although that would have been difficult without driving my rental car off a cliff, because I used the window to stablize the shot and I was about as far as I could safely go. Venus really wasn't intended to be the focal point of the shot. But rather, I thought the shot was pretty holistically. Does every shot really need just one point of interest?

Thanks again for taking the time to critique my shot.
-joel

rjpat

I like the first crop best, nice pano, but straightening the horizon on the right and then making sure the tree is straight, might make it even better.