PhotoBlog: Week 2

A lot of my sunset and cool cloud photos are taken from this spot. This is the view from the backyard deck of my house. It would be much better if that giant tree wasn't there, but that's not something that I can change. Regardless, I really like the shapes of the clouds and the colors of the sky that evening.

Sunsets and clouds are always a good combination for photos. There are usually a lot of colors and a fairly high dynamic range. The shapes of the clouds are always different from sunset to sunset, giving each sunset and cloud photo it's own 'personality'. Depending on where the photo was taken, silhouettes will usually turn out really nice with the clouds and sunset as the background. Trees tend to do particularly well in this regard.

This particular tree would have been nice had I gotten a better angle on it to get more of the tree's silhouette instead of just the top of the tree. Unfortunately, there is no way that I will be able to get that kind of shot because there will always be way too much clutter behind the tree. Yes, there is the method of superimposing a silhouette of a tree over the spiffy sky. However, I'm personally not a big fan of doing drastic photo editing and pass it off as real photo.

The extent of my photo editing would just be cropping, correcting exposures, contrast levels, and some hue saturation. However, I would still prefer to shoot it correctly on the camera and do no editing at all (apart from adding a border and crediting the photo). I am amazed by what some people can do to manipulate photos and create them into something that is really cool. However, I am more so disturbed when they try to pass it off as real photos. I am starting to like all the things that can be edited when shooting in RAW. However, it sometimes just takes too much effort to process a photo for letting others to view such as on Facebook. It also takes up so much space on the memory card.