As I happened to be on holiday in Germany for a week in some stunning countryside I made several attempts at carrying out the project. I found that what was or was not 'successful' depended to a great extent on the subject matter and the amount of detail in the sky and/or landscape. I was fortunate that every day was a sunny day with a reasonable sky so using as little of a grey featureless sky as possible did not arise. I have chosen just three images
I personally prefer the 3rd image as the centre of interest for me is the detail in the sky. The second drags in too much of the foreground and it is difficult for the eye to travel into the picture as the brightest area is at the bottom of the image. The sense of scale is also lost as the small grassed area occupies as much of the frame as the dark wooded areas on the hills. The first image is acceptable but the horizon line chops the picture in half and there is insufficient detail in the edge lines of the horizon to make it interesting.
This latter point, the interest created by the horizon line, appeared to be one of the keys to a successful image. It requires very little change in the line, say a church spire, just enough to spark the curiosity of the viewer.
As stated earlier there was a sequence a warm sunny days with a blue sky and just enough cloud formation to make it (the sky) interesting. A common problem in the UK is the featureless cloudy dull sky where we have to strive to reduce the deadening effect of the monotonous grey. To take the third image as an example one only has to imagine the sky as being a consistent grey to know that the overall impact would be much less. In that case I would have chosen to place the horizon line as close to the top as reasonable and lessened the effect of the bright green at the base of the image by slightly de-saturating and also darkening. Alternatively and probably a better result would be to crop the image to a 'letter box' taking out approximately the bottom third
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