This is a single image from a Sony a7RII with Zeiss 16-35mm f/4. Settings: 19mm, f/16, ISO 100, 1/6s
I captured this in a random bit of forest I found last fall in Colorado, one of my best finds in a few years.
Jason, you’ve struck gold in this photo 
with all of the aspen leaves and the sunstar. I also like the crisscross of fallen trees leading up the drainage. This looks like a good candidate for a composite, with a -1 (or even -2) EV shot to reduce the size of the bright area around the sun. It is lovely as presented.
Thanks, Mark! It almost feels the crisscrossing in the foreground is staged but that’s the way I found it. I like the big flare but did shoot a bracket of the scene if you want to try your hand at compositing it, I’d really be interested to see what you get!
Jason, I’m willing to try a composite. If you’ll send an email to seaverphotos@gmail.com I can send you a link to my dropbox, that’s for handling full resolution files. If you want me to make a quick try with jpegs, you can add any bracketed images to your original post and I can work on those. I am traveling for the next few days, so it may be next week before I can work on your files.
Looks really good to me. The sun dominates, but it should, as it is the star of the show (pardon the pun). Great job on the dynamic range, as the forest looks great.
Jason,
Love the scene and composition; all the diagonals, criss-crossing of fallen aspens and the little gully that runs up the middle leading the eye in to the frame, all work beautifully.
I think I’ll be a detractor and say the sun is a bit overwhelming to me. And I’m trying to figure out how the bright area could be so large given such small spaces between all the trees. I guess I’m just expecting something a little less bold, if that makes sense. Might just be me though.
Excellent exposure and processing overall.
Lon
I just sent you DNGs via WeTransfer so keep an eye out, thanks!
Thanks, @Harley_Goldman!
@Lon_Overacker Thanks! Everyone has different preferences so no need to worry about being a detractor! I’m pretty comfortable with my editing and style at this point in my career that it’s always interesting to hear other perspectives.
I figured I would share an image of the scene from the evening before with a copy/paste of the editing. You can definitely see why I went back in the morning!
Jason,
I’ve downloaded the files and opened one in Photoshop, so it looks like the transfer has worked fine. I’m traveling (driving from our MD house to our MT house so I’m not likely to get any significant time to work on these until Monday or Tuesday.
Sounds good, no rush! I have my own composite so I’m just interested to see your take, thanks.
Jason, here’s my first cut composite. I did some raw adjustments on each, put all three into PS with the adjustments as layers, added a black mask to the 2 darker layers (on top of the lightest) then used luminosity masks on the black masks to paint in specific areas. Then, I added burn and dodge layers to adjust the tones again using luminosity masks to control which tones I was adjusting. Finally I added a Yellow saturation layer, as an attempt to mimic the yellows in your original post. I had to flatten the PS version as it was over 2 GB. OOPS, sorry about my copyright statement, I forgot to remove that when I exported the image.
Thanks for taking the time to show me your edit @Mark_Seaver! Not sure I can forgive that watermark though .
