Purple Haze

[Ewie]

We had an amazing sunset earlier this week and I took some photos from our backyard. As things developed the colour of the sky went from pink to orange and then purple as it got darker. The cloud texture was amazing.

The view from our yard is not great unless you like looking at other houses, chimnies, TV aerials etc etc so I used an 85mm short telephoto (hand held) to capture as much cloud detail as possible.

<a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/kwozzie_nz/2312920501/" title="Sky Fire by Ewie_NZ, on Flickr"><img src="http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3253/2312920501_d2014cb6a4.jpg" width="334" height="500" alt="Sky Fire" /></a>

EXIF:

Sony A100 DSLR + 85mm F1.7 lens
1/125 (-.7Ev, 0Ev, +.7Ev) @ F8, ISO200

POST: Sync WB in Lightroom and exported to TIFF. Removed noise for the 3 initial exposures in Noise Ninja, imported and combined to HDR in Photomatix Pro and tone mapped. Small amount of cloning and patching in CS3 to remove artifacts produced during HDR.

I'm very much a newbie at HDR and would like feeback on the treatment of the image(s).
- Tone-mapping, have I gone too far?
- Overall colour and contrast
- Sharpness. I deliberatley left the image with a soft-focus feel, should I sharpen more?

As usual, any other constructive critique is welcome.

[Ewie]

So either this is so bad you're all speechless, or so good that there's no critique required... :)

[Nicole]

I hadn't seen it, there's my excuse :p I guess I just don't find myself drawn into the image because there's just clouds. They have a really good colour and the clouds themselves have a good texture, but without something else in the picture...

The processing itself looks good though. :p Looks kind of space-like.

[moi]

Different time zones so now looking. I like the deep, rich colours a lot. Maybe crop top and bottom to really take the eye to the 'molten' light effect?

[Ewie]

I hadn't seen it, there's my excuse :p I guess I just don't find myself drawn into the image because there's just clouds. They have a really good colour and the clouds themselves have a good texture, but without something else in the picture...

The processing itself looks good though. :p Looks kind of space-like.

Different time zones so now looking. I like the deep, rich colours a lot. Maybe crop top and bottom to really take the eye to the 'molten' light effect?

Thanks for the feeback folks... I realise that depending on time zone some new threads don't appear as new and unread for very long.

I was going for a surreal look with this and really wanted to highlight the colours and texture of the clouds. My intention was that one would have look and try and decide what they were looking at. I think I achieved that.

Also I guess it's not for everyone... That's OK. :)

[commongrackle]

I love the gorgeous colours, but I would definitely prefer more detail in the clouds.

[Nicole]

Thanks for the feeback folks... I realise that depending on time zone some new threads don't appear as new and unread for very long.
Uh-oh, what's my excuse then? :eek: