After my fourth visit to Japan, I finally got the landscape photo I always wanted. It encompasses everything I love about Japan in a single shot: the golden sunset over the island-filled seas with the rice field terraces in the foreground.
Everything was perfect for this shot, which rarely happens to me. The weather was great, with just the right amount of haze in the air, causing the sun to cast a bright golden glow on the scene. The rice fields were flooded, and the location was amazing. Plus my camera didn’t give me any problems like it usually does. I think the shutter is sticking or having some power issues. It’s a Sony, what do you expect? 🙂
The icing on the cake, and my favorite thing while shooting this scene, was this goat wandering the fields, screaming like an angry old man, destroying the tranquility of what was in front of me. It was hilarious and awesome; you would never know looking at this print.
The Tech Specs Behind The Shot
I took this landscape photo in Saga, Japan, between 6:30 and 7:00 p.m. It was a three-shot HDR exposure.
I used the Sony A7r with the metabones adapter and the Canon 16-35mm II lens.
The software used was just Photomatix, Lightroom, and Photoshop with Nik’s Dfine 2 to remove some noise. There was a lot of dodging, burning, and some saturation control. That’s it.
What’s incredible is the final Tiff file ended up being 1.5GB. HDR photography with that 36-megapixel sensor on the Sony A7r will keep your hard drive alive. This is why, lately, I’ve been shooting a lot of street photography in APS-C mode with that Zeiss 35mm lens. It’s ghetto but also helps crop past the edges of that lens, which are piss poor.
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