fhmillard

Thank you for viewing and your comments. Here is a ghostly reminder

of destruction of woodlands in the southern Appalachians (US) leaving

only empty mansions in the sky in place of near pristine forests.

Thank you all. This was taken at thr GA (US) Aquarium the day after Thanksgiving shooting over lots of other people (and being bumped), but the D300 @ ISO 1600 did well; my choice of 60mm f2.8 macro worked out well for the crowded environment and composition. This image was rotated vertically.

Carsten here is a cropped and rotated version of the original raw image in color.

Thank you Carsten. This was my only vantage point. I did some hue/sat work on the "greenery" at bottom of falls.

This, like some of my other photos, was taken with the aid of a climbing harness and anchor rope to get a better view.

This color version, to me, is better for focal attention, than the also very good B+W's.

I see the left side more subdued in luminosity and focus, giving the "curls" on the right more visual prominence.

Well the horizon is tilted about .5deg to the right, which you might want to correct placing emphasis on the leaning lighthouse.

This is a fine composition. The visual impact might be enhanced with some more back ground contrast and better highlight control on the waves in foreground, which appear blown out -- set white point on waves; you may need to try selective levels or dodging on a layer copy.

I usually use a gradient to obscure out of focus parts of the image, as in the lower part here. I think you could crop all but the wave action here.

Thank you all for your generous comments.

Carsten, the snow is too bright, but I did not see it as an issue. Using a perspective control lens has reintroduced manual photography and the importance of a tripod. This is a hand held shot at f11, so the lower 1/3 of the image has been cropped for lack of dof, the clouds in the top portion are not sharp enough for me, and the snow is too bright. If I had used a tripod, the dof and highlight issues may have been controlled better with the proper exposure -- f32 @1/40sec.

But I like the overall results, since I was able to "lift" the background for a much better view of horizon and get the near mountain peaks in proper visual alignment.

Overall, in my view the image lacks good tonal variation, especially in center right foreground where the jagged rocks and peaks are well differentiated.

This area got 6 to 12 inches of snow yesterday, but may be gone in couple of days, so I can return and retake.