A Vision Voice

This image was made about 4 miles from my home. I hike in this area quite a bit because it's close, the sunsets are "on" more often than not, and there tends to be a variety of subject matter. Wildlife, trees, a creek, ponds and hiking/horse trails. It's the Meadowood Recreation Area located in the Mason Neck area of Virginia.

On this day (May 1), the evening sky was shaping up well for a nice sunset so I made my way out here. I decided to play around with the idea of making two exposures, one for the sky and one for the foreground and then layer them together in PS to give one image where the sky and the foreground are properly exposed. At times you run into situations where one part of a scene is brighter than another part and the camera isn't capable of exposing the entire scene correctly. You get a nicely exposed sky but the foreground is too dark or the foreground is exposed nicely and the sky is blown out. This problem is encountered most often when shooting landscapes.

I won't go into details on the PS technique, but a web search will likely take you right to a good tutorial. Like this one. And this one. It's not a secret technique, I just want to keep this entry fairly short and the likelihood of me creating a better tutorial than what you can find elsewhere is slim to none. I wanted the greatest depth of field that I could get, in this case on my Tokina 12-24 AT-X Pro lens, that's f/22. I took an in-camera spot meter reading of the sky (f/22 @ 1/5 second) and of the foreground (f/22 @ 1/20 second).

Hmmmm....that's quite a difference I thought, that's six clicks of the dial. I thought about pulling out the only graduated ND filter that I own, a Singh-Ray 3-stop soft step. But, no, I wanted to put the PS techinque to the test.

I went with it and found that it worked pretty well. However, I thought it needed some help so I brought up the "graduated ND filter" in Nik Software's Color Efex Pro 3.0 and finished the job. It really fine-tuned the image to what I had previsualized while setting up the shot. Something I call my Vision Voice.