Cameron Highland, one of the favorite landscape spot of mine in Malaysia. It have the largest Tea Plantation in South East Asia, covering a total 8,000 acres planted with tea plant. Driving along the road here, you will see the neat tea plants covering up the hills, forming a beautiful and refreshing view. There are several sunrise angle here, this one that I took, is a angle that famous among the local wedding photographer, mainly because it is easy access, and there a place for the couples standing there and pose for their pre-wedding shoot. (which is outside the left side of my photo, I just prefer a tighter and clean composition since I no plan to put any model in it. 🙂 )
For the video about the place, check it here. 😉
Shooting Info:
29 mm focal length,
7 Bracketing Photos at ISO-100. f11 aperture from 1/60 seconds to 1 seconds shutters speed.
I start with -2 exposures photo, using another 0 exposure photo just to slightly recover the foreground. I have took another extra photo with my finger blocking the sun, which will also block out the lens flare too, and blend it in together to remove the lens flare, at the same time I also performing some dust cleaning (You can see there’s plenty on it, lol ). I adjust the color balance using color balance adjustment layer, tend to adding more warm and red colors to the picture. Loaded in Nik Software, I use pro contrast to added more dynamic range, a polarization plugin to further darken and bring out the colors of the sky and another contrast color range to further enhance the colors. After that with luminosity masking, I added several Curve adjustment layer, adjust the contrast specifically for several areas of the photo. I also add another layer for Dodge and Burn, which I focus on the highlight area that fall on the tea plants, making the highlight much more noticeable. Also a bit of curve adjustment to brighten up the area around the sun. After that I saturate the colors based on different color channel that I want. (Always try to avoid adding saturation on the Master channel, as it will saturate everything include some of the colors that you don’t want to.) Lastly, I perform sharpening on the image and also noise reduction on the sky before I export the photo.
Here is the before & after comparison:
Another bonus photo, Cameron highland also a good place for milky way photography, and I shall back again more often in this year. ^^
Night Sky
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