My First Posting~Critique please

[abbie_benson]

This is my first posting, since you should post befoe your critique

others work . It's not great but I like it. Taken with a old F3 and

a old nikkon 24mm lens at F8. Circ. Pol filter

 

Feel free to critique<div></div>

[frank uhlig]

Dull composition, looks underexposed a bit, grainy.

 

Isn't there a critique forum on Phnet? Please look for this under the Forum headings.

 

Thanks

[jason michael]

Where is the absolute black and for that matter the first few zones? The image is

muddy...perhaps the negative was underdeveloped and/or the print was poorly

executed. I can't get past the technicalities to see the image...

[lex_jenkins]

The most obvious problem is that repeating pattern of circular shapes in the sky. It appears to be an artifact from using a round brush tool in your image editing software. Very distracting.

 

I've attached a quick fix as a suggestion for improving the tonality. Because the original jpeg was flawed the modified version will be as well, lacking shadow detail and having some blown highlights.

 

The composition itself isn't bad but definitely needs some punchy contrast to hold the viewer's attention.<div></div>

[2yellowdogs]

Abbie,

 

Lex did a nice job of improving the tonality of your shot. Much better contrast in his version. A lot more punch.

 

Another thing you might try is shooting either ealier in the morning or later in the day. That mid-day sun makes everything sort of flat. When the sun's at more of an angle, it give everything greater definition (and more contrast in the afternoon).

 

Not sure what those marks are in the sky - very strange. Didn't really look like they came from a careless brush tool to me.

[Guest]

Abbie, there's no need to post before you critique others' work. As Brian Mottershead said <a href="http://www.photo.net/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=005bUY">earlier today</a>, "Does anybody care what Szarkowski's pictures look like, or even whether he ever took photographs?"

[john_n._wall]

To my eye, the major weakness in the image is the absence of a point of interest in the foreground. Suggest for this shot you cut off the top and bottom and make it a panoramic. You have something working for you in the grove of trees to the right and the line of trees running up the hillside from left to right, with the rather nice sky above, if you get rid of some of that sky and also sacrifice a good bit of the grassy space in front. Suggest for the future with shots like this one that you put something in the foreground -- imagine, for example, those large rolls of hay that one sees in open fields. Or a farm implement. Or a large pile of rocks. Something to define the foreground that would give you a sense of depth. But the image would need to be sharp from front to back.

[tcb.photo]

Hi Abbie

 

Nice attempt. I think the above critique says it all, and they gave some good advice. I'm interested in the marks in the SKY, did you try and "Burn" the sky in a photoshop or elements type program? Or is it a "Weird" cloud thing?

 

I love to do lanscapes, but I do them very poorly. So keep trying and post the results.

 

Thanks for sharing

 

Rob

[lex_jenkins]

I'm betting the marks are from a large round brush tool. I got identical marks whenever I tried to do any serious image editing in my old slowpoke Dellosaurus Pentius Unas 90MHz PC, and occasionally when using large brushes on large TIFFs on my PII machine. With slower machines the brushes stuttered as I tried to make smooth sweeps. Until I got a PIII machine I generally confined my image editing to global changes or very small brushes.

 

They're too well defined to be something like swirl marks on the lens or filter - some improbably DOF would be needed to resolve that much near-far information.

 

Poor Abbie. Here we are dissecting artifacts in a jpeg...

[ken_schroeder]

Just another opinion, not speaking ex cathedra... Abbie, I like your image. I find the link size too large for my monitor. (I hate to scroll to see an entire image.) I like the smaller size projected when I click on your name, although something in between would be fine, also. I might have printed it somewhat lighter and burned in the four edges somewhat. I like very luminescent shadows; I might have used a light or perhaps medium yellow filter instead of the polarizer.

 

For my taste, your image can work well as a quiet image. That is as much a reflection of me as much as of you; I like my own prints the same quiet way. That's the joy of this forum--differing opinions.

[abbie_benson]

Thanks for all your help. I had tried to "burn" the sky in with photo shop. I hadn'r noticed it as much until the contrast was adjusted. Something I must learn to improve.

 

I'm going to post another, so perhaps you will be kind enough to look and give a critique on it also

 

Thanks

 

Abbie

[larry n.]

Abbie,

 

This is a decent composition, but is it the best you could have made in that spot?

 

More importantly, what were you trying to achieve? If you have an clear idea, you will be able to apply technical elements to achieve your purpose.

 

For example: let's say you wanted to the image to have depth. Then you would work on having a dark point, a light point and all the shades in betwee, like the others suggested.

 

If you wanted drama, mystery, openness, grandeur, whatever...you can work for that through your composition, lighting, and image processing.

 

Without a clear idea, you might get lucky with a good image once in a while. You didn't get lucky here: although it's not a bad image, the idea behind it is pretty muddled.

 

Hope this helps.