Last Sunday, February 12th, I woke up early and headed for the Medicine Lodge Hills area north of Sylvan Lake for a sunrise shoot. What a sunrise it turned out to be! I didn’t have an exact place in the hills or subject in mind before hand, so while traveling up and down range roads in the hills I came across this old, abandoned farm house in the middle of a field. I could tell the sunrise was probably going to a good one since there were hints of color showing high in the clouds while it was still mostly dark out. Out of respect for the landowners, I didn’t want to climb over the the fence and trespass into the field to get closer to the house. It would have been nice to get closer to try out different compositions but instead I just went for a simple snapshot. As for the sunrise, it was one of the best and brightest light shows I’ve seen behind a camera. During its peak, it was tough to expose the sky properly. Even dialing down the exposure compensation a few stops still overexposed the sky, and going as low as 4 stops managed to tame the highlights a bit in the sky, but severely darkened the top and edges of the image. I had intentions on blending a few exposures, but instead I used this single RAW image as the sunrise was beginning to fade and just made a few selective adjustments using adjustment layers in Photoshop.
Very nicely done – and without HDR, too! Sweet.
Nice shot, nice colour, a bit small tho
I think I know where that shack is, love that country out there. Especially when there is a supercell floating over it.
Best wishes on the upcoming week!
Thanks for looking and commenting, Frank. I don’t care for cartoony HDR images either, but I do blend exposures that have alot of dynamic range using layer masks in photoshop.
Thanks Pat. I think we were a bit west of where this photo was taken watching that storm at the end of June a few years ago. Hard to believe its already my 5th summer of watching out here in Alberta this summer. I have every Fri/Sat/Sun off in July to observe and will likely head out on an obvious big day as well. Thanks for thinking of us also. I’ll be a Dad any day now!