Last year in Yellowstone the weather was miserable, as apparently it is often in the Springtime. As day came to evening, I got in the car and made a beeline for this geyser area praying (maybe a silly thing to pray for, but it was sincere on my part) for a potential clearing in the sky at sunset. As soon as I got to the parking lot, it poured raining, like, poured. But I was there, so I figured why not, and walked quickly up the boardwalk to a spot that seemed good. Then the magic started to happen, and I hope I captured at least some of it. I tried using the leading line of the hot spring to lead up to the mountains. The clouds complied and somewhat continued the line the hot springs formed. I am thankful for that experience, but I would love some honest critique on this. It's not a place I get to go just anytime, and I hope to go back again sooner than later! This was taken with a Canon T2i, 10-18mm EF-s lens @16mm, f/16, 1/13th, ISO-100.
Hi Jeremy. I like raw light leading in from the left of frame toward the geysers and the bright pool of light reflecting the sky. You have a good separation of light and dark but some dodging and burning highlighting the ripples could have been used to heighten the drama. It is difficult shooting wide angle in landscape to my eye at leat. The result is you have too much foreground and sky and your central element is missed. I think a bit more detail in the mountains would have been nice. The sunrise looks as if it could have been colourful, perhaps a telephotos landscape of the geysers and sunrise would have worked. There are good elements to the scene to work with but as a base exposure it may be a stop underexposed for developing the image as you will have noise in the shadows. I think its quite novel in how you treated the shot, portrait orientation and wide angle are generally used to max effect by tilting the lens up or down to force convergence, you have decided to keep distortion down and pull the eye through the frame. It just needs detail in the middle of the frame
Hey, thanks. Yeah I see what you're saying. I may try to re-edit, or go back and check out other photos of the same shoot see if ones a little better. This one was in my pictures folder so was easy to grab for this. The sky did get more colorful but the shapes weren't there, and I liked how these clouds kind of mirrored the line in the hot spring. I need to work on bracketing exposures... Never was a fan of doing that, but you're right the detail is lacking a bit in the middle. Thanks for the comments, I'll take them to heart.