Merry Christmas to all. Today's image was taken last summer from tree line on New York Mountain near Vail, Colorado. As I was standing on the side of this hill the sky seemed very washed out, almost white in the direction of the setting sun. I asked myself, “I wonder if there is any color in that sky at all?” I took several test shots underexposing the sky and to my surprise there was color, the question was how I would saturate it on an image. Saturation is the result of several things, the Film or CCD you’re using, the quality of the glass in the lens, the coatings on the lens, and finally the exposure. By underexposing slightly you can increase saturation. Art Wolfe commonly has written in his books that he generally underexposes by 1/3 stop to add saturation. I don’t know about 1/3 always being the number, but underexposing will add saturation. Consider that the photo is taken directly into the sun, also consider that the detail of the foreground is visible, and the sky is filled of color. The difference between the meter reading on the foreground and the sky was about 9 F-stops. To make this photo happen I sandwiched three 3-f-stop split neutral density filters together to reduce the exposure of the sky to that of the foreground. The camera was a Nikon D100 with a Nikkor 24-120 Lens at the 24mm position, 1/60th @ F/4 on a tripod. The shutter was slow enough to record movement in the grass in the foreground, that’s one element of this image that I really like. The other element is the silhouette created by the trees on a richly saturated and very colorful sky. The third element that really draws me to a photo such as this one is the presence of so many different complimentary colors. All of the topics in this post are covered in depth in my photography workshops. As with all images appearing on this site, they are the property of Loren French, and they are protected by copyright. Any images can be purchased as prints, or right to use can be purchased for any use. | 
