Dream Lake and Emerald Lake last Saturday

We had a great time last Saturday. Usually we get lots of wind and no sunrise when we go up this way. hop you enjoy these pics.

this is a composite of four shots at Emerald Lake. I'm not quite sure but the Dream Lake shot didn't show up as colorful as the image I worked up in photoshop?

Ok,
Thats it! I just got back from RMNP yesterday and now I already want to go back.

Beautiful shots James!!! I love the colors in the first one at Dream. It sure has melted off quickly. I remember standing on the lake taking pictures of the ice just a few months back. The morning sunlight really has shifted, illuminating the the whole left side much nicer.

Emerald looks likes it is just on the verge of thawing.

Beautiful pictures! I was up there later in the day, and by that time it was a bit windy.

I really like the dream lake shot, great light. Nice job!

Pretty shots James! On this monitor (which is uncalibrated and a bit on the dark side) they appear a bit too dark, especialy emerald.
The dynamic range is so high i'm not sure how i'd remedy that, but i think even the highlights could survive a boost. Also, i think that even though the sky is unremarkable, there could stand to be a bit more space above the mountains, which appear "crowded" to me.

Looks like a lot of us were in the park last Saturday. Great day!

Very nice compositions, but I agree with Stan about the crowding.

Also, the Emerald Lake shot appears over polarized with the upper right sky almost black.
I like the Dream Lake sky much better.

Great images! I really like the light in the first image.

What a nice pair of shots James. It seems like there was some problems in save to web. Maybe you did your edits in a different colorspace and the conversion to sRGB didn't go the way you wanted. Either way, the compositions are nice as is the light.

Mel-

James, These look a little too dark to me, especially the foregrounds. You might consider a digital grad ND filter effect in Photoshop to bring up the forgroung & trees some. I also think you have a little too much on the left side in the top photo - consider cropping it to 8x10. aspect ratio.

I was up there myself last Friday and did the Deam Lake "Two Rocks" shot. Still working on the version with red alpenglow; for some reason I liked this slide better.

thanks for your comments you guys. Tony , I cropped it to an 8x10 and liked it better. I'm going to start from scratch again and put in a little more sky. Is the digital grad ND filter in photoshop elements? I actually liked the Emerald Lake shot a lot and I'm going to try working on the sky to reduce the polarization.

To do a "digital grad" effect in PS, select the bottom of the frame with the rectangular tool, then go to quick mask mode & use the gradient tool to create a transition between the area you selected & the rest of the image. Then exit quick mask mode and create a new curves layer to brighten the foreground. You can do the initial selection using other means than the rectangular selection tool, you can blur the edges of the selection with gaussian blur instead of the gradient tool; there are all kinds of variations.

AWESOME! FAR OUT!