Mountain Storm

[John Cowie]

First, I want to thnk you guys for doing this forum. I'm surprised you're not getting inundated with images. I don't want to abuse your generosity, but since there's not a great deal of activity at the moment, may I???

This was shot late afternoon just on the New Mexico/Colorado border in Raton Pass. The storm stretched about 60 miles on both sides of the border, and I happened upon the only break in the clouds right in the pass.

Natural light, shot with my Canon 5D and 70-200.

This is the pano, cut from the original image included below.

[DougAxford]

John, that's a great image.

My initial impression was that you've gone to far in saturating the warm colors for my personal taste. Then I thought that since I haven't been to NM, maybe the colors are actually very accurate. I'd be interested in your answer on that.

I think this is one of those images that can only be appreciated as a huge wall print. It's sorta like seeing a great movie on a 26" TV.

DougA

[Curtis Cunningham]

Hi John,

I love the colours, but my eyes wanted to see a little bit more of the clouds (upper left) and trees (lower right). I've attached what I hope illustrates this. To me it helps to frame the beautiful sky a little better.

Curtis

[Curtis Cunningham]

For some reason I also wanted to see what it was like to have the colours inverted. The blue provides a nice contrast with the white.

Curtis

[Noel_Carboni]

Beautiful image, John. All are welcome, (especially images this good). Really shows the awesome power of nature.

I see your dilemma on how much or how little to crop. All in all I think I'm most fond of the uncropped version. I'll bet it looks stunning in a large size. The color feels good to me here.

Curtis, don't you love an image that sparks your creative juices? You've turned a summer storm into a winter fantasy.

-Noel

[DougAxford]

I had a moment to reflect a bit more and I guess what's bothering me is that this is an image of power and majesty. The very warm tones seem to diminish this power IMHO. I equate warm with softness, cold with power - must be my cold weather upbringing. I just wanted to see what it would look like in cooler tones, partly after the sample from Curtis.

I simply pulled into PS, used auto color (which I never use), then levels with the dark eyedropper in the very bottom section to get a clean black and smoothed Levels a bit. I think I would crop part of the top sky off to balance the dark land at the bottom, but not as aggressively as John did.

Not sure if it's better or worse, but comments invited.

DougA

[John Cowie]

Thanks for the compliments guys, means a lot to me.

The color is just a touch warmer than as shot, and is pretty close to what I experienced. I did bump up the temperature a tad, but also lowered the vibrance a touch as well (don't ask me why, I was moving the sliders and watching the effects).

I pushed clarity and contrast a bit so the mountain range showed through a touch better as well, but that's about all I did to it besides noise reduction and cropping. I tried playing with it in grayscale but kept coming back to the color version. Seems more powerful that way.

I agree with Doug that his last image is more powerful and I like his version a lot, but I find myself drawn to the warmth breaking through.

As to cropping, I tried several cuts and pretty much liked them all, including the original shot. The reason I settled for the crop I posted was the way that shaft of light falls off out of the frame and leaves me wondering where else it goes. I know, bad technique to draw the eye out of the picture, huh?!

The really cool part? I've got a series of shots that show that shaft of light slowly working it's way north till it just starts to reach the crest of the mountain. If I had not been hand holding the camera, it might have made an interesting animation. I've wondered what I would have seen if I'd stayed and continued tracking that light, but it started raining on me...