Beautiful light and an idyllic scene. You handled the exposure beautifully and despite the wide open aperture--interesting choice...I'm assuming you shot at 5.6 to maximize the shutter speed to counter any wind...but I'd have been inclined to up the ISO to 200 and shoot at f/8 at least--as near as I can tell after viewing the larger image, you had adequate DOF.
My only nit is a compositional suggestion--I'd prefer a bit more room on the left so the barn would have some space to breathe.
Regardless, it's a very nice image with great mood.
Posted by Toni Lankerd on July 11, 2008 at 12:15 PM
Welcome to the MWNP forum, Kevin.
This is a beautiful scene, especially with the wheat starting in the foreground, then going farther back into the image. Nice work!
Posted by Wayne Nelson on July 11, 2008 at 12:26 PM
Great shot Kevin. Nice exposure balance between sky and foreground. It is the type of image that makes you want to have been there.
I agree Kerry about wanting to give the farm some room to breath, but there was a road and some equipment right alongside the barn that didn't fit too well into the scene. I wanted to add more DOF as well, but I was handholding and 5.6 was as slow as I could get. For some reason it seems if I step up my ISO I really start to notice noise, maybe its just this xti camera, I would love a 5d someday...
thanks again everyone,
kevin
Posted by Chuck Beatty on July 11, 2008 at 2:06 PM
Wonderful, warm image, Kevin. The light is amazing.
Welcome to MWNP! We're looking forward to seeing more of your work.
Posted by wally emmert on July 11, 2008 at 5:42 PM
I like it as is except for one thing. The sky has much more drama than the wheat, and I would have liked to see it framed with more sky and less grain. That's just IMO.
Do you use the histogram to expose to the right? The XTi is not a noisy camera, and at iso200 you should have absolutely no noise problems. That's especially true if you look at your histogram after taking a single test image and use in-camera exposure compensation to move that histogram as far to the right as you can (thus overexposing). If you move it so far to the right that your highlights are blown out (you get blinkies on the back of the camera and the right side of the histogram is cut off if that happens), bring it a bit back to the left.
Exposing to the right will produce far less noise in shadowed areas, and the overexposure is easy to correct in Photoshop.
Discussion
9 repliesHello everyone, fairly new to the board, lots of great photographs on here, and good people as well.
This is an image from the sunset last night. Some storms blew over then the sun lit the sky on fire... This was taken down the road from my house.
Trying some new techniques in CS3, I'm still a newbie with this software, let me know what you think.
Here is a link to a bigger file, didn't want to go over the forum guidelines..
http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3093/2657788611_fe2d8dfe23_b.jpg
Thanks, Kevin
Canon xti
Sigma 17-70
17mm
ISO 100
1/15 @ f5.6
My only nit is a compositional suggestion--I'd prefer a bit more room on the left so the barn would have some space to breathe.
Regardless, it's a very nice image with great mood.
This is a beautiful scene, especially with the wheat starting in the foreground, then going farther back into the image. Nice work!
I agree Kerry about wanting to give the farm some room to breath, but there was a road and some equipment right alongside the barn that didn't fit too well into the scene. I wanted to add more DOF as well, but I was handholding and 5.6 was as slow as I could get. For some reason it seems if I step up my ISO I really start to notice noise, maybe its just this xti camera, I would love a 5d someday...
thanks again everyone,
kevin
Welcome to MWNP! We're looking forward to seeing more of your work.
I like it as is except for one thing. The sky has much more drama than the wheat, and I would have liked to see it framed with more sky and less grain. That's just IMO.
Do you use the histogram to expose to the right? The XTi is not a noisy camera, and at iso200 you should have absolutely no noise problems. That's especially true if you look at your histogram after taking a single test image and use in-camera exposure compensation to move that histogram as far to the right as you can (thus overexposing). If you move it so far to the right that your highlights are blown out (you get blinkies on the back of the camera and the right side of the histogram is cut off if that happens), bring it a bit back to the left.
Exposing to the right will produce far less noise in shadowed areas, and the overexposure is easy to correct in Photoshop.
An excellent job capturing beautiful light!