Hi Kurt,
Landscape photography is often a challenge because the sky is more often than not brighter than the landscape itself. Because our eyes always want to drift to the brightest part of a picture, this tends to mean that left unchecked, a sky will always distract you away from the lower half of the picture.
With these thoughts in mind, it is often a good idea to try to darken a sky down so that it is not stealing too much attention away from the important parts of a picture.
In the old days there were several techniques for burning in a sky. if you were shooting with negative film then chances are you would have burnt it in while making the print (this is where more light was added to the sky during the exposure). If you were shooting slide film then you would need to control the sky at the time you captured the photograph and that usually meant using a neutral density filter… a filter that was dark at the top to reduce the light from the sky but clear in the lower half of the image.
Nowadays most people are shooting digital and what is interesting is that the techniques for managing a sky have not changed that much. If your preference is for shooting landscapes in JPEG mode then you should get yourself a neutral density filter; it will help darken a sky. My preference though is to shoot in RAW mode. A RAW file is often described as a digital negative because, like negative film, it has a lot more latitude. In a RAW convertor you can usually darken the sky will keeping the land in the foreground looking good.
Now, I am unsure whether you shot this image in JPEG or RAW, but either way I would look at darkening the sky – before you put the image through a HDR convertor. In fact, chances are, as you darken the sky, you may not even need HDR.
Hope this is a help!
Cheers,
Anthony
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