05/05/16 Featured Arkansas Landscape Photography–Springtime sunset over Pinnacle Mountain

A strange combination of light for springtime in Arkansas, but it made for a wonderful shot.

Taken with a Nikon D800e, Nikon 14-24 @ 14mm F 8, ISO 100, exposure bracketed in 3 frames and worked up in Lightroom with Topaz Clarity

The evening I took this, I have hoped for a bit more cloud cover, but the spring colors were out in full so I went ahead and worked up the shot.  This was taken from one of my all time favorite spots over looking Pinnacle mountain.  Here you are looking due west, so depending on the time of year, you can sometimes catch the sun setting right on top of Pinnacle.  As I recall the best times for this are in late March and September, but it’s been a long time since I went after that shot.

Even with Nikon I went ahead and bracketed this shot, I feel many times that in protecting the shadows, I will blow out the highlights and they will never be recoverable.  I worked this shot up once before a couple of years ago, but never got it where I liked it.  Now with the HDR feature within Lightroom, I went back to the raw files and worked them up again.  This time I got much better results and then worked on the file just a bit in Topaz Clarity.  I am not sure why the sky went black at the top, but that is just how it worked out, I kinda of like it!

The HDR feature in LR has it’s problems, but most of the time I can do what I want and get the effects I am looking for so much easier than any other HDR tool I have ever used.

The spring colors in Arkansas just looked great on this evening so it all came together for me.