A Pictorial Sunset

As the winter sun prepares to duck behind a mountain ridge in David Thompson Country in the late afternoon, a high layer of cloud takes on a warm glow. The patch of warmth competes with the chill, dark impression of the lower cloud layer, silhouetted mountain, and trees.

The quality of light is what originally attracted me to this scene, but I wasn’t sure how the results would come out. And indeed, the camera didn’t capture what I was looking at in the way I expected.

What came up when I reviewed the images from the day was a kind of abstract combination of colors, tones and detail that brought to mind vintage gum bichromate prints from early pictorialist masters. This appealed to me, so I took the development further in that direction. This included primarily some tonal adjustments to more firmly establish the kind of mood I was thinking of, stitching a pair of images then cropping the result to a square format to get the framing as I wanted it, and finally applying a bit of abstraction-inducing “spatter” brushwork filter in Photoshop to make the image detail (what there was of it) more suggestive than literal.

Read more of this post at my main blog site:
http://blog.vividaspectphoto.com/2011/03/27/a-pictorial-sunset/