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Valley Forge National Park


Marvin

Software: Adobe Photoshop CS3 Windows;


From the category:

Landscape

· 290,309 images
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Hi Marvin,

 

Contre-jour lighting is typically very difficult as you must choose what you want the focus of the photo to be on; it's often used as a silhouette, or with fill flash to compensate for the strong backlighting. There is insufficient dynamic range here which has led to the sky blowing out quite badly; there is also notable purple fringing around the high-contrast leaves. As precaution against this, have you shot raw here? If you had there would likely be more to recover and you might not have lost so much detail in the sky (a plain white sky rarely looks good in colour photos, but often works well in black and white for some reason). I note you have processed this with photoshop, so you should be able to correct some of the more objectionable optical effects when importing with Adobe Camera Raw.

 

Perhaps it's worth deciding what you want the subject of the photo to be? A silhouetted statue would probably look quite nice, such as against a well exposed sky, or even against that area of leaves where the light is shining directly through. At the moment it's hard to recognise the statue as it's camouflaged by the trees behind it.

 

Apart from those points, it's well composed, you've controlled exposure well given the limitations of the lighting, and it's an interesting view. I'd also warn slightly against the use of such a prominent drop-shadow around the frame; I'm guilty of overusing frames myself, but drop-shadows look a bit dated these days due to their previous overuse.

 

Thanks for sharing; an interesting photo, I'd like to know a bit more about the statue. I presume it's a revolutionary war monument?

 

Best wishes, Mark

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