Hogsback, Eastern Cape [Pic heavy]

[Spam]

Some pics from Hogsback in the Eastern Cape, South Africa. It's an anomaly: a lovely, little bohemian village on top of a mountain with beautiful scenery, surrounded by some of the most abject poverty in the country. Most of these pics were taken at a restaurant appropriately called The Edge - not a place you want to go stumbling around drunk. C&C welcome and appreciated.

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[Shadowman]

Great looking skies, #10 is my favorite of the bunch.

[IzzieK]

My picks are 1, 2 and 5. I kept wondering about those clouds when the mountain meet them. Would it be similar to Victoria Mountain where the clouds will be like flowing white lava on them? All are very nice. I love them.

[rpcrowe]

Wonderful captures and conversions. Looks like a red filter effect was used in the B&W conversios. Although I like all of these images, I tend to like #'s 7 & 8 best...

[madcrow]

Great series. it is the colour for me.

[Spam]

Great looking skies, #10 is my favorite of the bunch.

Thanks, John.

[Spam]

My picks are 1, 2 and 5. I kept wondering about those clouds when the mountain meet them. Would it be similar to Victoria Mountain where the clouds will be like flowing white lava on them? All are very nice. I love them.

Thanks, Izzie. The clouds often do amazing things around this area, but sometimes there are none at all; I was lucky on this day. Where is Victoria Mountain? I tried to google it but only got hits for "Victoria Peak".

[Spam]

Wonderful captures and conversions. Looks like a red filter effect was used in the B&W conversios. Although I like all of these images, I tend to like #'s 7 & 8 best...

Thanks, Richard. All were shot in RAW, and I used Nik Silver Effects for the conversions.

[Spam]

Great series. it is the colour for me.

Thanks, Maurice. Most of the colour pics were shot with exposure bracketing (using a tripod) and blended afterwards using the HDR function in Adobe Bridge. The pros do the blends manually in Photoshop, apparently, but I haven't yet figured out how to do so.

[Donald]

Most of the colour pics were shot with exposure bracketing

Am wondering why you chose to go this route, Simon? I wasn't there, obviously, but there doesn't seem anything in the scenes that I would have expected to over-stretch the dynamic range of your camera.

[Spam]

Am wondering why you chose to go this route, Simon? I wasn't there, obviously, but there doesn't seem anything in the scenes that I would have expected to over-stretch the dynamic range of your camera.

The main problem, Donald, was that the mountain sides/valleys were in shadow, even though I was shooting around 2pm, and when the sun wasn't behind a cloud it was very bright. Here, unedited, is one of the three exposures I took for image 3 (above) just to give you some idea of the conditions. When I took these pics I had to hold my hand above the lens to avoid flare.

[bnnrcn]

Hi Simon , #7 is my fav Some of the images look oversharpened to me, especially the skies. If you can step back a bit IMO it will be a very nice set.

[Spam]

Hi Simon , #7 is my fav Some of the images look oversharpened to me, especially the skies. If you can step back a bit IMO it will be a very nice set.

Thanks, Binnur, I know exactly what you mean, and it's been bugging me a little too. I'm actually not doing any sharpening at all: it comes in with some pics as a result of the Nik filters, and I don't know how to dial it back. Maybe it's the "structure" component? I'll check it out.

[Geoff F]

My only slightly negative thoughts are that you have some horizons which are halfway between land and sky. I would prefer to lose a little from either foreground or sky to make one of them into the dominant element for a better composition.