Sky on Fire

[paulVsullivan]

I Have seen plenty of sunsets in my time this one gave the impression that the sky was on fire.
However it did not last long.
Taken at 15th of a second at f8 and 35mm focal length.



Anyone care to comment

[gahspidy]

I like your composition here very much. The foreground is simple and the silhouettes interesting enough and well balanced. The sky looks like it is on fire , as you said, and it is a great subject and a good choice of including most of it in the frame. The only problem I have with this is the silhouettes, especially the one on the left is not sharp, but rather out of focus. I am thinking that this was taken hand held? If so, you would have been better off opening up your aperture to increase your shutter speed to at least 1/60. You may have wanted the slower shutter to soften the what looks like a fast moving sky, but for that you would have needed to tripod.
I still like this and it is a good image, but I would only like the foreground silhouettes in sharper focus.
Good work

[mpreslar]

I concur with Gary on the sharpness issue. For this setting I would suggest a tripod AND if your lens can do it, an aperture of at least f/16 to get a deeper DOF. Still a wonderful capture of an amazing sky, and I know what it is to not have my tripod and still want the shot! That is why I bought a car-window pod and a beanbag pod to carry in the car! Before that, I had a "sunset shot" locale that I used that has a chest high (for me, a short guy) stone fence. I would put my camera on my winter gloves to get it pointed in the right direction. You could also prop it on something sitting on the ground as long as you could adjust the angle to get the shot you want. Low angle shots can be very interesting, especially with deep DOF!

[paulVsullivan]

Thanks for all input, below is a small portion of exactly the same image.




Very savagely cropped!

[GB1]

Amazing shot! This is almost scary and surreal. I would have sharpened it a little, but it makes the impression it needs as is. Maybe a little more interesting foreground objects too, but they're not the focus of the shot anyways.

-GB

[julsoph]

PaulV...I drove back from ME with my mom, and we saw a sky like this...it was just astounding. I like your intense colors here. I do see what the others are saying about the sharpness, but it doesn't bother me...as it's in silhouette.

Emily

[freygr]

With seeing the object, the display size it has to be, it will never look sharp. I do like the photo.

[paulVsullivan]

Again thanks for all your input. I think the original photo I posted suffered a lot from compression.

Here is a section I enlarged out of that same image. As you see not even the pine needles are visible - they are blurred out though compression.


Compare that to the original image; the entire image is far to big for any computer monitor.


Cheers

[bloodorflies]

i really dig this shot..the color in the sky is pretty hypnotic....nice.