- Sunset Across the Expanse -
This shot is a focal range stack. This is gonna get all educational, so buckle up.
The foreground was shot at the rather wide angle of 16 mm. This is great for foregrounds and midgrounds, but wide angle lenses tend to minimize things in the background that are near the middle of the frame and make them appear rather small.
If you angle your camera down to get those items closer to the top 1/4th of your frame you can begin to elongate them and give them a little more visual impact. However if I did that in this instance I would end up losing a lot of these really great clouds and textures as I would edge them right out of frame.
Instead I chose to take a second shot of the sky at 37 mm. This focal range gives the sky the visual weight (via scale) that I want for this composition.
So it's a blend of two shots, one taken at 16 mm and another taken at 37 mm. Both were taken on the same day and from the same place, but blended in post-processing to create an image that better represents the visual impact of the scene had in real life.
This is what I call a sky augmentation. I didn't replace the sky (full sky replacement) with a better one, I simply made the sky that was present at the time a little more impactful.
