This is a field of yellow flowers (rape?) near my house. High aperature which gave me the nice sun. Its a little dark on the right which people might complain about, but I like it so we will try!
post: My picture is being discussed in this thread so I thought I would offer up what technicals there are on this image.
I used a very high aperature (by concious choice) to pull the light in so I could get those awesome rays on the sun. I had a circular polarizing filter stacked with a graduated ND filter on it so I could get above and below line exposed properly, or at least close =) You can still see from the yellow flowers that they are not quite as clear as they should be. The sun I think was too bright for my graduated ND which caused a slight over expsure on the bottom half of the image. Tried to get it better but I couldn't the extreme differences in light I think were just too much.
The sky, well the high aperature also had the effect of drawing the light in tight, you know like on those night shots where the stars show above a bright city scape. I honestly liked the effect when I saw it later because I liked the bright rayed sun, and that really was the point of the image.
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Place: 185 out of 394 Avg (all users): 5.6884 Avg (commenters): 4.0000 Avg (participants): 5.7200 Avg (non-participants): 5.6053 Views since voting: 799 Views during voting: 250 Votes: 138 Comments: 3 Favorites: 0
A beautiful subject, and challenging lighting conditions. I gave this image a 5.
I find the dark area in the upper right to be overly dark, and it gives a very present sense of extensive post processing. There is nothing inherently wrong with that, but for me this is distracting. In the context of the brightly sunlit day, it is a bit incongruous. In the distance there are some little bright elements (roofs, perhaps?) which are also a small distraction--they don't add compositional value (as they might if recognizable objects) and the image might benefit from their removal. The dark area of the flowers along the left side appears unnatural and abrupt.
I really liked this picture, the rich colors, contrast, strong composition all drew me in. There are 3 things that bug me; the sky seems to get very colorless right before the horizon, especially on the right hand side, the super saturated top and bottom make it look awkward and out of place; there are some crazy refractions going on around the sun, not sure if its dust or just the lens but it do without; and the last is the lens flair in the bottom right hand corner, sometimes lens flare can be nice if its being used as a compositional item but this isn't adding anything to the image. Three fairly minor things, had I voted in this challenge I would have scored this a 7.
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