Very pointy. With one of the most beautiful auroras I've seen in a photo in the background. I removed the guy from the summit. Didn't actually have anything against him - he works great as a point of interest in the original portrait format. But in the reframed landscape, he is just a little too close to the edge of the frame and drags the eye out of the photo instead of in.
I also sharpened the whole thing for added detail.
This is the outdoor Museum of Folk Architecture and Life of Ukraine. That's near Kyiv. Hopefully it's still standing. They should update it with a few tractors towing tanks, maybe.
A wonderfully spooky photo, but the colors were all over the place, and dirty as hell. And I don't think they were like that in reality. I actually managed to sort them out, but in the end I went for 'day for night' variant. It looks very Tim Burtunesque.
I like the composition and the colors of this. I wonder if it is a singe shot or a composit; I am almost certain the moon was added-in. It looks like it's in front of the clouds, but it is possible that the eclipse darkened it just enough that it washes out the part of the cloud over it without backlighting the rest. But the whole lighting situation is very suspect - the mountain looks like it's illuminated from the front and above. Even the clouds seem to be dropping shadows onto it, which puts the sun above and a little behind the camera, but certainly above the horizon. This makes no sense, as the sun has to be below the horizon for the eclipse to occur. The lighting could be a result of a long exposure and ambient light, but then I'd expect the clouds to be blurry, which they are not, and shadows to be so soft that they disappear. I don't know. To remove the at least some ambiguity, I made a small whisp of a cloud go over the moon.
I removed the contrail - i know that it was an important part of the composition, but kowing it is man-made just breaks the desolation and the tranquility of the photo for me - and fixed the general levels of the image.
Finding nice aurora photos can be tricky. The low light conditions usually means photographers will use long exposure to shoot them, but that means - see my Pet Peeve #1 - that anything moving in the photo, including the aurora itself, will turn into mush. Or you'll have a grainy photo. Well, there isn't any of that here, and the result is a beautiful and atmospheric photo.
I just upped the contrast a bit to bring out the aurora more, and removed the vignette - see my Pet Peeve #2.
Did a lot of processing here. As I wrote before, I don't like high-key images for wallpaper, so i decided to take the brightness way down. Basically turned day into night (or perhaps a storm). Increased the contrast, boosted the blues, and finally, moved the background iceberg a bit to the right, as it was distractingly close to the main one. I think it's more balanced this way.
But you can't really stage nature, can you? A photo by Denis Bodrov, a Ukrainian photographer, so I guess this is somewhere in Ukraine. He has a specific style - most of his photos are moody pieces shot during nightime, with wonderfully eerie atmosphere.
Cleaned up the photo a bit, raised the contrast - mostly on the cloud - and removed poor Denis (I guess?), because I like the feeling of desolation more.
