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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Dangerspouse" data-source="post: 747107" data-attributes="member: 46690">For this week's Challenge, "Music", I originally planned on doing a portrait of my wife playing her viola, possibly shot through the cut-outs of her ornate antique music stand. I may still do that one of these days, but as I was mulling it over I thought of something I'd prefer to try.I've posted a few pics of an overlook in the woods that surrounds our house. It's a bit of a rocky promontory, looking out over a wooded valley that rises in the distance to a series of low hills. I had the idea to set up that music stand on the promontory with some sheet music on it, then stand with my back to the camera holding my flute. I imagined the effect would be someone playing music over this beautiful expanse of multi-colored fall foliage and out to the far-off hills. Y'know, f/32 stuff. That's how I imagined it, anyway. As it turned out, there were some things I didn't consider. 1. The multi-colored fall foliage is several weeks past. The view is now all bare branches and dun colored leaf carpet. 2. That promontory doesn't get any light this time of year from noon to sundown, as the hillock and trees behind it block everything. I could have tried full noon light but 3. It's been very cloudy, and my test shots were rather depressing.So, change of plans. I decided to try a sunrise silhouette. As luck would have it, the eastern sky showed some clearing when I got up this morning (I get up around 4:30am). So before sunrise I backpacked my gear, a tripod, my flute, and the music stand into the woods and set up. I quickly however discarded the idea of using the music stand. In black silhouette it just looked like a blocky blob. I had a lot of fun trying different settings and angles. What did frustrate me a bit though was that I could not focus on me very well. I tried several times to adjust minutely between shots, but I never really nailed it. I like nice clean edges in a silhouette, like it's a black paper cutout, but I just couldn't manage it. In post I discarded some of my favorite shots because the edges were just too fuzzy. I think part of the problem was that once the sun actually crested the horizon, I have only very few minutes before it rose and became obscured by the higher clouds. Oh well, you do the best you can with what you're given, right?Anyway, as I said I really enjoyed the process, and am even reasonably happy with some of the shots. Here are my three favorites that I didn't discard. The first one is the one I submitted to the Weekly Challenge:[ATTACH]348294[/ATTACH].[ATTACH]348295[/ATTACH].[ATTACH]348296[/ATTACH](That last one I enhanced the blue in the upper clouds a bit, but in retrospect I'm not sure it worked.)</blockquote>

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