Big Sky country

[blinnea]

Went out with my dad tonight around the backroads. Thought this was a nice shot over looking the river. Was wondering if there was too much negative space? There is no PP done to this photo. If I did any what would you recommend to enhance this photograph?

EXIF-
manual
1/80
F 5.6
Iso 100
110mm

Thank you everyone!

[TBrown00]

The shadow areas in the foreground are too dark and don't provide any detail for the viewer's eyes to look at. Is this what you meant by negative space? An easy way to fix this is to shoot with a graduated neutral density (GND) filter to darken the sky. Without one, you have to choose to expose for the sky or for the foreground. Had you exposed for the foreground in this photo, your sky would be blown out. The other alternative would be to shoot this as an HDR and post process it that way.

As for post on this photo, you could try playing with the fill light slider in camera raw or lightroom to see how much detail you could recover from the shadow areas, but they appear to dark to be able to pull any data from. You could also try the built in GND in camera raw/lightroom if you have either of those.

[blinnea]

hey thanks! I will definitely look into getting some filters.

[crockny]

Personally I think there is too much boring sky in this photo. The interesting part to me is the river and the trees on the riverbank ... if you couldn't zoom in at the time you can always crop in post...it also appears a little tilted.

[Krusty79]

Here is a discussion on filters - GND filters | Flickr - Photo Sharing!

I also think you need a more compelling subject. In addition to using a GND filter, I would recommend shooting RAW and bracketing your shots so you can make one jpg for the sky, one for the ground and blend the two using a layer mask. There is too much range in most landscape scenes for your camera to correctly expose the sky and ground, so you need to compensate for that.

[blinnea]

Originally Posted by crockny

Personally I think there is too much boring sky in this photo. .

yes i agree. That's what I was trying to refer to when I said negative space.

Originally Posted by Krusty79

I also think you need a more compelling subject. In addition to using a GND filter, I would recommend shooting RAW and bracketing your shots so you can make one jpg for the sky, one for the ground and blend the two using a layer mask. There is too much range in most landscape scenes for your camera to correctly expose the sky and ground, so you need to compensate for that.

I'm still learning a lot on PP so I have a lot of studying to do to know how to achieve this. Thank you for your comments!