greymule Loc: Colorado

Too bad my wife doesn't share the same attitude. LOL

docrob Loc: Durango, Colorado

Actually i wouldn't have taken hundreds of shots - I never do - I work smarter than that and I trust my vision and my experience way more than to think if I couldn't get what I felt was right then and there that shooting a zillion pics would change that. And maybe an hour wouldn't have been enough - maybe if the scene struck me as that good I would have planned to return (pros do that you know) and your right the average person probably wouldn't do that.....I would though....guess not for you?

And lastly, it is about attitude. Mine is to be slow down and watch, let the subject show me the way to capture it, get a feel for the scene and ask myself how to best communicate that. I take that same attitude when I post....yours seems to be speed up and hurry, fix it down the road with whatever and be done with it. That same attitude shows in this post to me too - you didn't bother much to really hear what I was suggesting - you just saw it and me as ridiculous, slammed me with sarcasm and went on........

docrob Loc: Durango, Colorado

silly - never take the wife on a photo shoot

greymule Loc: Colorado

I'll tell her she'll have to stay at home for our next vacation.

docrob Loc: Durango, Colorado

Been married 31 yrs been photographing 35 years - surely you can figure out a way that you can go photograph and she can do what she likes? It isn't that hard - just a little communication will do.

Turbo Loc: Raleigh, NC

The image is showing how dark the scene was. So it is never "too dark". If you want to please the viewer and make the pic more palatable for the casual viewer, then you can brighten it a bit. As far as the dynamic range, yes a ND filter would tone the contrast down a bit and show details of the sky.

If you shoot in RAW mode, you can probably use PhotoShop and play with "shadows / Highlights" to reveal details you will never see in a JPEG picture.

GDRoth Loc: Southeast Michigan USA

docrob, I didn't mean to come off like that....I wasn't slamming anyone. If I took a hundred shots I would end up with 4 or 5 keepers in the end........Since I live in Michigan and the shots were taken in Colorado I assume I'd never get back there........I'm not a professional and probably can't return the next day....

Sorry for the miscue...

docrob Loc: Durango, Colorado

thank you.....i am not a professional either but I would take the time for any scene and if it happened to be in Michigan and I couldnt go back then I would try to expose my heart.....if not a silicon chip.


again, thank you for that

RobGilchrist Loc: Thompson Falls, MT, USA

With apologies for messing with your shot, how about this solution?

greymule Loc: Colorado

Looks much better with the crop, than the blown sky. I promise myself to be hyper-aware of too much dynamic range and either omit the offending part or HDR it.

Thanks everyone for the help!

skylocke Loc: Toledo, Washington

How about something like this???

greymule Loc: Colorado

Wow!

RMM Loc: Suburban New York

You probably would have been better off bracketing your exposures and merging them (HDR or a similar process of blending layers). It's been suggested that you could have shot without the sky, which would have given you better exposure in the dark areas, but would also have changed the composition. Even so, there's a lot of tone and color to work with. I don't know what the lighting really looked like, but here's another version.