Love the texture on those clouds! although they look a little blown out in the highlights, this is a very contrasty image overall, so it doesn't really look off.
Lovely reflection as well, as I see it I can't help but wonder what and HDR of this scene would look like
Great work friend, it's always a joy to see your work.

--
"God is the greatest artist ever, I'm just blessed to be able to capture some of that beauty with my camera..."
- Jesus Salazar

Thank you for your feedback. The blown out highlights in the clouds is a continuing problem I'm struggling with. Photomatix cannot cope with this very well. Perhaps I will have to start UV filters on my lenses for sky/cloud shots like this. I have been using the RAW editing program within Photoshop CS3 in these case, which allows me to correct this for a great deal, often even completely.

Yes, Adobe Camara RAW can help you pull some details back from blown highlights, but it's far from a sure thing and sometimes it has odd color casts in those blown out regions (this will drive you mad, at least it does me )
UV filters will not help you very much with the highlight problem, I use them just to protect then lens, plus they are easier to clean than the curved lens surface.
Have you tried bracketing? sometimes to really capture the complete tonal range you will need to expose for the sky and then for the ground. Then you can load the multiple exposures into Photoshop or Photomatix and HDR Merge or at least blend the exposures to your hearts content Another great option would be a grad ND so that you can compensate for the brighter sky and then a third option (less recommended) is to use your highlight preview mode so that you can see the blinkies where the highlight blew out, then use exposure compensation shoot again and then in Camera Raw brighten the underexposed areas of the image and use a noise reduction plug-in (NIK Dfine or Noise Ninja are very competent)to reduce the noise produced from pushing the underexposed image. The downside (aside from the noise issue) is that if the shadows clip to black then you have the same problem but on the other end which is just as bad.

--
"God is the greatest artist ever, I'm just blessed to be able to capture some of that beauty with my camera..."
- Jesus Salazar

When I have the tripod with me, I use auto exposure bracketing and that usually produces good results. Sometimes even that does not help :anger: not even mentioning the issues with fast moving clouds.

I guess all of this is the reason why it is so satisfying to see a HDR nearing perfection

love it. great photo