before and after. it was almost a dark and stormy night (critiques welcome!

Could not get to the location where I wanted to shoot this from in time to catch anything at all.
The bright portion of the sky was getting closing at a pretty quick clip.

Shot this last night and played around with lightroom to adjust hightlights, shadows, contrast white and black point, lens correction... etc...
Sony a7, kit lens, zoomed to 70mm i believe.
Apperture priority f8 probably (its usually what I shoot currently)
ISO100
probably 13-15 seconds shutter.
(I then resized the files in windows live... dont ask)

Anyway, I am in the learning curve with lightroom. Learning the controls...
I feel that the area around the tree line has halo which I have toned down a bit but not as succesfully as I would like.
I feel I don't have a handle on the colors , saturations etc yet.

Any critiques would bewelcome!!!

I like the second one. The colors seem true to life. It is impossible to get that lighting with a camera. It captures the transition from day to dusk just right.

Thanks jamzdean,
The second on is the first one with edited.

That looks like some good editing of a difficult lighting situation. Do you shoot in RAW? If you don't you might want to consider. I feel it gives me the most wiggle room once in lightroom.

If you like doing landscapes, you might want to consider some graduated ND filters. They can help you have the correct exposure in the sky while still maintaining detail in shadows.

Download the Big Sky presets http://lightroomkillertips.com/files/2012/08/matts_big_sky_presets.zip
it's one of my goto presets for LR

MArkM10431, I will try that
Edcculus, I do shoot in raw, but don't yet have any nd filters for this kit lens. I got the a7 a couple of weeks ago.

Very nice work.

Nice shot! As far as better lighting and details, try the same shorebird the same circumstances but use ISO400/800 RAW with an Fstop of 6-8. May give you what you're looking for. If not, play with your shutter speed. But again, nice shot! Also if available, set the focal point to the ground in front of you and use focus point metering.

I don't know anything about the program you used, but your editing job for photo looks great IMHO.

Nice pictures, beautiful colours in the sky. Second one looks a little over exposed in the lower half. Might be worth tweaking the exposure or shadows a little in LR, to bring that down. For my eyes anyway. Could also be a little sharper. Was the picture taken from a good tripod? If you have the right version of lightroom or PS, you could try making a one image HDR and see what the gives you.

Interesting input.
I don't think its the tripod. I have a bogen. It's a pistol grip type but pretty solid. i auto focused and then 2 second delay shutter release. I need to start manually focusing. Not sure how sharp the kit lens is. Could be the lens or a 1D-10T error.
thank you all for the input. Relatively new to photography. Just taking it seriously in the last 4 months.

I'll try the one exposure HDR this week. Possibly tonight. I have a video job to edit first tonight though

I'm still on the 'light duty' side of camera things. I don't use DSLR (YET!), and edit mostly with PIXLR.

My opinion, excellent editing, but in the end I prefer the edited sky, with the unedited car park.

Hope you don't mind my presumption, but I think that this image lacks a focus. No pun intended. I don't know what this is a picture of. Here's what I think I would do with it.