Columbus Clouds

[Bulgart]

Hello everyone. I took this shot few days ago after ditching work for a little bit to capture the amazing clouds. I was rushing so I don't get in trouble, so I didn't plan the shot very well. When I got home and looked at the photos I wasn't very impressed. The sky looks interesting, but not as wild as it did when I was there.

Should I have underexposed a little or maybe used a polarizer, or maybe different composition without the street and the high risers?
I would really appreciate any thoughts on how I could have done this better. Thank you.

Exif:
Exposure 0.017 sec (1/60)
Aperture f/7.1
Focal Length 28 mm
ISO Speed 100


Columbus Clouds3 by bulgarts, on Flickr

[Krusty79]

The sky still looks pretty dramatic. I think you should leave the buildings in the shot to give the clouds some perspective. Shots of just clouds lack that. I like the freeway leading into the image, but the horizontal overpass interrupts the flow for me. If you're good at cloning, you might want to clone that out.

Besides trying a polarizer or underexposing, there is another trick milosh has mentioned. You can add a duplicate layer to your image, but set the blend mode to soft light. Play around with the opacity setting and you might like the results.

[Bulgart]

Thank you for pointing out the overpass I now see what killed the flow for me, and I can't wait to go home and experiment with the layering. Thank you krusty

[milosh]

I think the way to go here would be to get down low on the highway (not exactly, that wouldn't be too smart, right? ) and include some foreground, maybe in 1/10th of the frame. It would make the composition much more dynamic. The sky scrapers make a great end to this highway as they lead straight up to those magnificent clouds. The overpass is a bit of a party breaker.