Finding Clarity

EOS 60D | EF-S 15-85 @16 | 1/60s | f/5 | ISO 400

Went down to the Shenandoah Valley with my girlfriend for the weekend to celebrate our anniversary. We stayed at a very nice little cottage just outside Luray, in Virginia. I brought my camera along just in case, but did not intend to take many, if any, photos on the trip. A storm ended up rolling through Saturday afternoon, so I shrugged my shoulders and figured there really would be no opportunities for any photography.

As we were watching a delightfully bad movie, I happened to glance outside and noticed the sky beginning to light up. I grabbed my camera and rushed outside. Seeing as things were a bit last minute, I did not have much time to prepare. No tripod, No filters, forgot to turn on Image Stabilization... it was a bit of a mess. But the sunset was so good, I had to get out there and try to get some pictures of it. I struggled a bit to find a composition I liked, and finally settled on the bales of hay. I hope they provide enough foreground interest to really draw you into the photo without being distracting. I struggled deciding about whether to focus on the sky of ground, and in the end, I did a split, but gave a little more focus to the sky as it was just such a great sunset.

This took a bit of playing with in post to bring the shadows and highlights in check, but somehow I managed to wrangle all this detail out of the image, and all with a single RAW conversion. At 100% detail there is a fair amount of noise, but at any normal distance I think this one presents itself quite nicely, and I think its going to print quite nicely as well.

Enjoy!

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