Western Sky God Rays

Please see LARGE.

I have never been religiously devoted to the sanctity of "straight out of the camera" images. The camera lies. It always has. What comes out of the camera (for a wide variety of reasons) is often no more or less the truth than what emerges from an hour in Photoshop. I have always considered that my task is to capture the spirit of difficult subjects as best I can ... often in spite of what the camera fouls up .

I was standing in Neate Park, Blackheath late this afternoon watching a heavy storm front move in from the west. I was looking past overhead railway power feeds and post mounted power cables from the street on the other side. The sun burst through a break in the clouds. I knew that the sensor would not be able to handle the required dynamic range and so I underexposed by two stops to give myself some latitude. Later I attempted to return the picture to what I saw with ONE exception. I ran the image through Nik's "Detail Extractor" to enhance the texture in the cloud and compensate for the detail loss during noise reduction. Aside from that, this is pretty much what I saw.