2013-08-04 19.55.46

Post Thunderstorm early evening. Not a thing was moving.

What was good/bad? What would you change?

Please look at the rest of the album for other photos during that same

window.

The only thing I know I would change would be to remove the orphaned twigs at the top right of the frame.  I'm a little uncertain about the amount of grass/shore you've shown in the lower left -- I'm wondering if it might be too insufficient and that more might have worked better (again, the orphan look); I don't know for sure.  Finally, it seems to me you have another photograph here, one that zooms in to include less, focusing primarily on the boat and the clouds (less sky and less water, and nothing in the lower left corner).  Also, I wonder about separating the boat from the reflection of the trees by getting a higher POV, if at all possible.  Surely you have a 12' step ladder in your photo bag.  Just my $0.02 or hopefully food for thought.

Thanks for the comments. I haven't done anything to the photo, and yes it is  actually a single photo. 

The photo is 'on-camera processed' as a 'HDR-like' photo, so the trees are a bit lighter than the actual light available (to the naked eye). 

If you look at some of the other photos in the set they show the darker treeline which is representative of the actual light levels. 

In terms of cropping the photo, I will do some cropping to pull out the branches on the right. 

I am afraid that if I crop out the grass on the left I will leave the boat stranded (no pun intended). I'm curious as to what others may have to say about it. 

 Also, I'm 6'9" so the POV, from the shore was at least 6'5". The tide was in as well, otherwise it would have been a couple of feet higher POV. 

Dan, this may seem like a minor comment, but it's still important, IMO:  you said you haven't done anything to the photograph, yet your camera itself processed it in a semi-HDR manner.  In reality, then, you did a lot to the photograph.  Whether you do it yourself, perhaps on a computer, or the camera does it via a jpeg conversion or other special processing it may possess, the photograph has been altered considerably.  And it also produced a better photograph by lightening the trees.

Thanks for the comment. 

I understand where you are coming from... I suppose it would have been clearer had I said, I have not done any cropping, image layering or other blatant image manipulation (like putting a boat from another photo) into this one. 

You mention that if I cropped out the branches and grass, it might look better. I do have a photo like that in this portfolio. Do you think that does the setting better justice? 

-Dan

I should also mention, which I purposely left out earlier, that this was shot with a Samsung Galaxy S4 camera phone. 

I think that the phone camera actually has more pixels than the old Canon D60 (think camera that came right after D30, early digital days~6.2Mpixels).