tugela
A classic view of the Tugela River at the base of the Amphitheatre in the Natal Drakensberg, still my favorite place on the planet...
This image has had a fair bit of post processing, so if you're interested in the technical details:
After wading through some pretty icy water to get to a photogenic position in the river (with my tripod being very handy in preventing more than the necessary amount of wetness), I set up my tripod on a teeny island and composed my shot. Although our eyes are capable of discerning a wide range of tones, a camera's sensor is far more limited, even when shooting in RAW format. So because the sunlight on the clouds and peaks was so much brighter than the shadowed river valley, I took a series of 6 bracketed exposures, so the highlights in each area of the image were correctly exposed:
Back in the virtual world of my pc, I processed the raw files into individual black and white images before combining them into a single high dynamic range (or HDR) image. HDR is commonly results in images that have an almost artificial painterly effect, but I prefer to use it to recreate a scene that is closer to what I experienced, bringing out the details that were visible to my eye at the time of shooting.
Finally I manually dodged the clouds in the middle and burned a few areas on the hillsides to selectively increase the contrast, added the coloured filter, something I usually don't like in my own images, but often admire in others', and viola...
