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Description
Taken in the Gap of Dunloe, Killarney.

Update 7/7/08:
I've added a detailed description of how I produced this for the *Ex-po-zure Advanced Photography 101 class.

Location
This was taken outdoors (in case you couldn’t tell ) in sunny weather with a few clouds in the sky. It was about 8pm in July, so the sun was low in the sky behind me.

Equipment & Technique
I used a Canon 300D with the 17-85mm IS USM lens. The exposure was 1/70 of a second at f/5.9, ISO 100. I didn’t have my tripod with me, otherwise I would have used a smaller aperture to increase the sharpness throughout the scene. I also didn’t have an ND grad filter back then, so in the raw image the mountain and sky were much brighter than the foreground, however shooting in raw allowed me to correct this later on.

Post Processing
To do this, I first opened up the raw image in Photoshop CS3, choosing the best settings in Camera Raw for just the sky and mountain top. I then opened another copy of the raw image, this time increasing the exposure value so that the ground was the correct brightness. This will increase the amount of noise in a picture, but shooting at ISO 100 gave me more flexibility before the image became too noisy. Next, I added a layer mask to the foreground layer and used the gradient tool to mask off the top of the image so that the original sky was exposed. I added curves adjustment layers to each copy of the picture to fine tune the brightness of each, then another curves layer to increase the overall contrast. Finally, I copied the finished picture onto a new layer and sharpened with the smart sharpen tool.

I hope this has been helpful, feel free to ask if there’s anything more you’d like to know!

Description
Taken in the Gap of Dunloe, Killarney.

Update 7/7/08:
I've added a detailed description of how I produced this for the *Ex-po-zure Advanced Photography 101 class.

Location
This was taken outdoors (in case you couldn’t tell ) in sunny weather with a few clouds in the sky. It was about 8pm in July, so the sun was low in the sky behind me.

Equipment & Technique
I used a Canon 300D with the 17-85mm IS USM lens. The exposure was 1/70 of a second at f/5.9, ISO 100. I didn’t have my tripod with me, otherwise I would have used a smaller aperture to increase the sharpness throughout the scene. I also didn’t have an ND grad filter back then, so in the raw image the mountain and sky were much brighter than the foreground, however shooting in raw allowed me to correct this later on.

Post Processing
To do this, I first opened up the raw image in Photoshop CS3, choosing the best settings in Camera Raw for just the sky and mountain top. I then opened another copy of the raw image, this time increasing the exposure value so that the ground was the correct brightness. This will increase the amount of noise in a picture, but shooting at ISO 100 gave me more flexibility before the image became too noisy. Next, I added a layer mask to the foreground layer and used the gradient tool to mask off the top of the image so that the original sky was exposed. I added curves adjustment layers to each copy of the picture to fine tune the brightness of each, then another curves layer to increase the overall contrast. Finally, I copied the finished picture onto a new layer and sharpened with the smart sharpen tool.

I hope this has been helpful, feel free to ask if there’s anything more you’d like to know!