the road home I

[SmartWombat]

This was a tricky shot, exposure was difficult and it required a fair amount of fiddling in Lightroom to get this far.
How is the composition?
It is worth editing this further?

[jkriminger]

Nice composition!..I would like to see more of the shadows and less of the blown sky. Any chance of a reshoot with better lighting? Is that a sensor spot on upper left near blue half circle? I like the compo and tree is magical.

[Dubbs5050]

real nice composition. I would like to bring out some more texture in the clouds. Other than that, it is a quiet and well composed moment in time. The Tree really makes this one work.

[SmartWombat]

Shouldn't be a sensor spot on the G9, no lens to change.

I wanted that evening lighting on the tree, which I think worked.
What lighting would you suggest?
Unless it's noon there are going to be shadows, and I don't think the tree will look as good then. I think it needs the low angle light onto the trunk.

Clouds were in two distinct layers, with thin featureless clouds high up (don't know what they're called) and the nicely shaded clouds lower.

[Frog]

Great place for the shot but its going to be a bugger to get the right light.
The road is just too dark and would probably be so in the morning, too.

[jkriminger]

Ok, if it were me I would painstakingly layer the sky seperately and adjust levels. I would also do this with the left hedge, road and just to the shadows on the right as another whole adjustment. Slight adjustments to both ..not too gawdy. As far as what time? I guess you could try just a little later with a longer exposure while the tree is still lit but the road and left and right hedge will be more uniform..?..

[Shooter Tiff]

If you shot in raw you could think about lowering the fill light... thats what I would try

[Frog]

How about an hdr?

[frleal70]

I was thinking it would be a good candidate for HDR too, but wasn't sure. Beautiful shot.

[Tyson L. Sparks]

Looks great to me, great find.

[SmartWombat]

If you shot in raw you could think about lowering the fill light... thats what I would try

I already raised the fill light to reveal the left hedge, bringing it out of the deep shadow.

[gahspidy]

I think you have a great composition here, Paul. The stratus clouds and the cumulus clouds below ( I'm not certain of the terms being accurate) create a great dimension for the eye to be lead to by the road and the tree. some nit pik would be i would like to see more seperation from the tree and the right hedge area, but that looks like you would need to get higher for that ( a little editing could do it too). The dark shadow along the road/foreground does take away from the image that we have here. However, i think if you had a car or bike, person walking etc. along the road it would complete this scene shadow and all. even a bird, something more i think it needs.

[fx101]

This is a perfect candidate for an HDR but... be very careful to not overdo the effect and turn it into one of those unrealistic CG-like images. I would personally bracket 3 images with a +/- 1.0 EV differential and if you use photomatix tone-map with the strength very low, or if not work with the image as far as you can in 32bit mode in photoshop then use the digital ND-grad technique:
Make three versions of the HDr-merged image (just duplicate the background layer three times). Convert each one to 16 bit at a different exposure level, so that the top layer exposes the sky properly, the middle is neutral (i.e. the tree is exposed properly) and the bottom layer exposes the shadow area properly. Bring the neutral layer to the bottom. Then create a layer mask for the highlight layer that exposes the sky and the light part of the bushes properly (i.e. use a black to white gradient at an angle so that it lines up with the shadow line at the bottom of the image). Then feather the edge of this layer to blend it in. Create a mask for the shadow layer that covers only the shadow area and nothing else (this will require brushes and the like) and remember to feather. The tree should be the bottom layer and be perfectly exposed. Use brushes to fine tune the layer masks until every part of the image you want is perfectly exposed. It's slightly tricky, but it will give you the contrast of the original image, with the wide dynamic range of an HDR. The photoshop method wil end up far better than the traditional photomatix HDR method.

Or... go out and shoot it again with an ND grad filter. Tilt it to match the shadow angle and then you get a nice exposure. It would also help if you warm the image a bit in photoshop to match the colour temperature of the lighting in the afternoon.