Castle Hot Springs & Lake Pleasant AZ

AZsnapper

A couple pics from around Castle Hot Springs and Lake Pleasant in Arizona from yesterday evening.

Castle Hot Springs was a famous resort for the rich and famous in the 30's and 40's. Presidents, movie stars, and even JFK vacationed here. Most of the orginal buildings are gone. If I play my cards right, I might be able to get the caretaker to let me on the property in a couple of weeks to take more pics...

An old barn a little north of the Castle Hot Springs


Moon rise over Castle Hot Springs


Sunset over Lake Pleasant

CatOne

Hmmm.

The first one I'm not too fond of... the barn is obscured; the foreground is busy, and the light is flat.

#2 has some potential, but the branch in the upper right corner is distracting and messy. I like that you've captured the moon over the hills during sunrise, but I know that with the sunrise color where I can see the band of light that with the right luminance and saturation adjustments that you could really make that color "pop." Also, the moon is kinda small in the picture... if you used a telephoto lens and took out a lot of the foreground you could make it look MUCH more interesting.

For example (these shots of mine have other issues but this is to show a point), look at how I can tweak the moon and make it look large here (using ~260mm focal length):



Versus here (~20 mm focal length):



(moon is lower left).

#3... I see what you were going with... color... and it's nice color, but the foreground is totally in shade and I can't see where the sunset really would be. This one doesn't really speak to me. I think it's probably underexposed for what it's showing... there's not enough light to be really interesting to me.

Keep at it!

AZsnapper

Castle Hot Springs
Wow - thanks for that - I didn't think they were that bad But, it's the only way to get better.

On pic 2, it's sunset time, in a canyon, so makes for some very hard light transitions. That's a combo of 2 images, so I should be able to work on the sky without affecting the rest.

On #3, it was near dark. that's a 15 sec exposure at f16. Guess I got alot to learn on these darker shots.

CatOne wrote:

Hmmm.

The first one I'm not too fond of... the barn is obscured; the foreground is busy, and the light is flat.

#2 has some potential, but the branch in the upper right corner is distracting and messy. I like that you've captured the moon over the hills during sunrise, but I know that with the sunrise color where I can see the band of light that with the right luminance and saturation adjustments that you could really make that color "pop." Also, the moon is kinda small in the picture... if you used a telephoto lens and took out a lot of the foreground you could make it look MUCH more interesting.

For example (these shots of mine have other issues but this is to show a point), look at how I can tweak the moon and make it look large here (using ~260mm focal length):



Versus here (~20 mm focal length):



(moon is lower left).

#3... I see what you were going with... color... and it's nice color, but the foreground is totally in shade and I can't see where the sunset really would be. This one doesn't really speak to me. I think it's probably underexposed for what it's showing... there's not enough light to be really interesting to me.

Keep at it!

erich6

I like #3 and I think you've got enough in the shot to get the most of it. Try boosting the overall exposure a bit using curves and masking the sky which you want to keep the way it is so you don't lose the subtle highlight tones.

Try a few crops to see if you can get a better arrangement. I would try a 16x9 format which gets rid of the lower 1/5 of the shot.

Erich