Taken on a family holiday after the mad rush of the Christmas season. I took my wife and daughter to a cottage called Ema-Fweni in the Champagne Valley, Drakensberg, South Africa after a suggestion from RianBotes. Thank you Rian - it was wonderful.
Ema-Fweni means "Place in the clouds" and we certainly were in the clouds for a few days. On one afternoon the clouds lifted a bit and this beam of light happened to shine through for about a minute. Luckily my camera wasn't far away so I managed to get few shots of this.
Editing was to double process the raw - one for land and one for sky to increase dynamic range. Blend using gradients and luminosity masks in PS. Curves adjustment layers to make clouds and sky pop. Some selective dodging burning used masked curves layers applied to the FG layers and light beam.
Resize and sharpen and SFW
Statistics
Place: 16 out of 217 Avg (all users): 6.5210 Avg (commenters): 9.2500 Avg (participants): 6.4375 Avg (non-participants): 6.6923 Views since voting: 817 Views during voting: 198 Votes: 119 Comments: 7 Favorites: 2 (view)
Greetings from the better late than never Critique Club!
First impressions: Excellent, almost Ansel-like. The dominant object in the shot of course is the ray of sun light. You did an excellent job capturing that. Everything in the shot, from the mountains to the clouds, stands in tack-sharp clarity. The seperation of the mountain tops from sky is especially pleasing to the eye. The ray of light, of course, acts to draw the eye nicely from the sky to the hills.
The voters rewarded your hard work, excellent placing in a free study.
If I were to think of things I would change in the shot, it seems as though the tones of the black and white conversion could have some more contrast. I am left wishing (at least on my monitor) that I could see more details in the lower part of the hills.
However, I don't think these things alone take away from an excellent shot. I would have no problem hanging this on my wall.
Wonderful Dragon's Berg image. Super sun spotlight and rays. Almost biblical. Listen to Creeds "Higher" whilst examining this shot. Stephen? 800px doesn't do this justice.
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