Thanks to everyone for looking and commenting.
The image is a "sandwich" - the foreground & mill building superimposed
on a separate exposure for the clouds. Everything above the buildings &
the dam are exposed for the clouds, while the rest, except for the small
tree in the middle foreground, is exposed to make the side of the
building closest to me 18% gray. It turned out a little lighter than that.
The exposure for the clouds left all of the foreground in silhouette,
and the exposure for the foreground and mill buildings blows out the sky
completely. Literally every bit of sky showed up as "blinkys".
I shot it as a series of bracketed exposures from a tripod and tried to
combine them into an HDR image, but I'm not having much luck with that.
My technique for HDR is just not working yet.
The slightly muted tone is my best approximation of what the lighting
conditions actually were; a thin cloud layer in the area of the sun
making a giant soft-box, with the color cast coming from the light
reflected off the sandstone in the foreground. I'm setting the white
balance in ACR off a neutral black point located up inside the shadows
under the mill building.
I used a curves layer to pop the color slightly and a levels layer to
set the white point just barely above where the white water on the wheel
starts to blow out, and the black point is set to just below the point
where the densest shadow begins to block up.
I wanted the "tourists" in the photo because I'm not satisfied with my
ability to represent people naturally, and I thought the experience
might help. That was one of the problems with the HDR, it made the
people look like ghosts.
I am pleased with how dramatic and dynamic the lighting turned out.
Again, thank-you to all who looked and commented.
From: "Daniel J. Matyola"
I like this one better as well. The composition is very effective,
with the stream leading the eye to the water wheel, which I see as
the center of interest. The people and the water flowing over the
wheel add a dynamic quality to what would otherwise be a static
scene. Thanks for sharing. Dan On Fri, Apr 23, 2010 at 9:39 AM, Rick
Womer <rwomer1...@yahoo.com> wrote:
I'm way behind on my list reading (there's this earning-a-living
thing, you know...), but anyway:
I like this much more than the first one. ?The wide-angle works
well, the people add scale, and the sky is dramatic. ?I wonder
about the white balance though, as things seem to have a muted,
almost amber cast. ?One might play with the curves a bit to
increase the contrast, too.
Rick
http://photo.net/photos/RickW
--- On Sun, 4/18/10, John Sessoms <jsessoms...@nc.rr.com> wrote:
From: John Sessoms <jsessoms...@nc.rr.com> Subject: PESO:
Yates Mill again To: PDML@pdml.net Date: Sunday, April 18,
2010, 9:19 PM Another photo of Yates Mill in Raleigh, NC.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/jb_sessoms/4532688343/sizes/m/
K20D, Sigma 10-20
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