Photos Critique for an Image?

Hi there, i'm new to these forums, although i have read Bit-tech obsessivly for about a year now. This photo was taken at Howqua River, Victoria, Australia quite early in the morning , when there was still mist in the air. Taken with a Canon 40D with 18-55mm lens; 1/200th @ f/11. A small branch at the top of the frame was removed in Photoshop.

Image is scaled down by 50% to save loading time.

http://img508.imageshack.us/img508/3779/img18401698editedsmallpc9.jpg

clumsy_culhane

 

nice trees love the light through them, and the shadows/mist.

could have maybe got rid of some of the dead branches at top of the tree if changing anything though?

just a thought, still like it though

 

1) Welcome to the forums
2) I'm not one of the photo experts ...
3) There's a Lot of great things in that photo but the "dead" space on the left detracts from that for me. Perhaps a simple crop could fix that and change the focus of the image. Here's a quick rough example:

 

Thanks for the quick replies to give the photo some context, i had been saving for ages (im 15) and i finally was able to buy the camera. The photo was taken about a week after i got the camera Now i just need to learn the art of photography....

 

The backlighting is wonderful, and the long shadows sprawling across the ground work well to help draw the eye into the image. I agree with Tyinsar that the left side of the image is a little empty. His crop works pretty well to fix that.

I would recommend leaving the dead branches on the tree. They are part of the tree, and they give it character and help lend a sense of place. Otherwise, it's just another perfect tree in a field.

If there is anything I would fix, it would be to try and bring the extreme highlight on the right-hand side down just a bit. The sun peeking through the trees is fine, but the white area extends just a bit too far, in my opinion. A bit of exposure tweaking should fix that.

This a good shot, all things considered. Though, now that you've spent a bunch of your hard-earned money on a fantastic camera, check out a few books from your library and learn as much as you can about exposure, composition, and lighting. If you're really into the artistic, landscape sort of images, then you might also look at a few books about the more "traditional" arts (painting, drawing, etc.). Look at Monet's landscapes and start to figure out what makes a good landscape look good.

-monkey

 

You made some good advice, Ill post a cropped and exposure corrected image tomorrow. I hope to enter the PoTM competition here at bit-tech too

 

Good advice that. Actually I don't think my crop went far enough (quickly done with IrfanView) so I created another (also quickly done with IrfanView):

and another that removes the context making it feel more mysterious:

And just for fun; another using the left side:

Of those 3 I like the first. This really is a fun image to play with. The original has so many great features but lacks focus - fix that and it's great.

 

I'm really quite a fan of Tynisar's first crop. Then, I was about to add to it and saw that supermonkey pretty much said everything I wanted to. Your colors are a bit blown out on the image, partially because of the bright sun and partially because of the mist. The sunlight is really over-brightening the right side, to the point hwere it's washed out. I'm not sure quite how much detail can be saved in that region, but I think you should definitely go ahead and try.

If you shot it in RAW, try toning down the exposure a bit before ANY post processing. Then you can merge that as a layer over top of your original shot and try to fiddle with opacity and masks to darken the right side down. By what I'm seeing here, a full stop or more would be helpful. The 40D has great color retention at the bright end so you should be able to rescue quite a bit.

Overall, I think you've got a good eye for a scene and an accidentally good technique. It took me a while (and many comments from Vers) to "oversize" my image, as you can always crop into the focal point after the fact. It seems like you've got that part down - so next up is learning to understand the lighting in a scene like this.

For instance, mists and clouds are really hard to shoot in/around, because they are partly reflective and play hell with your metering. You should always shoot "under" exposed by about 1/2 to 1 full stop to compensate for the overbright. You almost can't capture this level of dynamic range in one shot - I'd personally take a bracket (probably -2, -1, 0 with evaluative metering) and use photoshop to combine them.

Hope this helps a little bit with future technique.