Tip: Crop dead areas away

Misty Orange Sunrise

Sunrises and sunsets keeps amazing me. You still can be surprised and see new wonderful variations. This photo is hardly processed. In Lightroom I have increased the contrast a bit, lowered the clarity a little and then raised the vibrance slightly. Not a lot compared to what I do to some of my other photos.

Tip: Crop dead areas away photo
In the beginning I didn’t want to cut away pixels. The more pixels, the better. I’m still struggling with this, but I have learned that some photos really get a much stronger composition by cropping them.

This particular photo doesn’t have much of an interesting foregrund and the sky continues upwards as orange. It becomes dead areas with nothing interesting. By cutting that away, I cut away dead zones and is left with the good stuff and that makes a stronger composition.

Misty fish net

Misty fish net
This I saw after driving my son to school. I threw the car to the side of the road and got to catch this misty morning.
I have had this photo lying around for some time. I took it as a 3 shot HDR (2 ev steps), but I didn’t really work as an HDR. The light just wasn’t for HDR. Later I tried cropping away some ground and a tree to the left, leaving only the fish net. Now it started to be something. I then toned it slightly to the yellow/brown from cold grey. I did that by increasing the temperature from 5800 to 9433 in Lightroom and then the tint I added +14 to. Then I got this tranquil mood.