God Skies

Concept

During 2008, I took a cycling tour to follow "Le Tour de France". After riding some spectacular mountains in the French Alpes, we followed the tour route back towards Paris. After a hard day riding in the humid summer weather, I looked up to see the late afternoon sun hidden behind an enormous cumulus cloud with the moisture in the air forming the most amazing "god lighting" display I have seen.  

Setup

Handheld and shooting through the bus window travelling at speed. With camera set to exposure for the highlighted sky,  I shot off a series of frames to try to get one where the blurry foreground vegetation was not obvious, the roadside electricity wires did not intrude and the horizon line was balanced and interesting. This was the best of 8-9 exposures.
Camera Setup

Canon G9 at f4.0 ISO80 1/1000sec in aperture priority mode.

Processing

Adobe Lightroom brought back most of the highlights and cropping the image removed the blured foreground. Then began a long series of experiments to recreate the image as I remember it. Small  point and shoot cameras struggle with extremes of lighting. The low dynamic range of the sensor coupled with the high levels of software processing the camera does to optimise performance results in flat-looking, low contrast images. The best method I found was to massively reduce the RAW exposure setting and bring up the colour and highlights using the Curves tools. This image lends itself to the surreal looks which a lot of processing can deliver and had a ball applying a huge number of creative presets, however I was trying to recreate the image I saw.

Improving the photo

There seems to be a trend in my "improvements" section that shots taken hurriedly with a small point and shoot camera could be improved by using a better camera, taking more time and composing the shot in a more considered way. Unfortunately like many of my most valued travel shots, this was simply not possible. Chase Jarvis has an often used quote that "the best camera in the world is the one you have with you". Although the Canon G9 - however limiting - is an order of magnitude more capable than the iPhone camera which Chase Jarvis uses, in this instance I must agree.