I went out with my wife on a photoshoot because I get lots of 'Get out of jail FREE cards' when I do. I was really hoping for a cloudy sky that evening and was kinda bummed with mainly clear skies. But the moments of light right before and after sunset where spectacular. She was sitting down to rest on our walk back to the car and I looked up and saw the sun starting to be split by the mountains off in the horizon. BAM! This image/moment won me a few free weekends of shooting!
This was a single exposure. I over exposed by one stop on the A7r, as I find every Sony camera I have ever had underexposes by .75-1 stop. Then I really pushed the shadows in LR and got the image to my liking. Then I dumped it into Color Efex pro 4 and used Tonal Contrast to finish the image out. I only applied Tonal Contrast from about the horizon down. I find Color Efex can cause some serious banding and posterization in blue skies if your not carful. If you inspect the image at 100% you'll find some noise in my wife's dress because of the aggressive shadow pushing, but it looks fine on screen and prints good to 17x22, but I wouldn't print it any bigger than that.
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