g dan mitchell

This is a nice series - and of the group of three that I see here this is my favorite. I also like the hallway image with the lights and so forth.

The juxtaposition of the black with the not-exactly-white tones is interesting and I like the way you handled the gradations of the "white" walls.

The way the small vertical black bar on the right mirrors that larger black mass on the left is interesting.

Dan

Since you asked for some honest comments, here goes...

What works:

You gave some thought to foreground in that you included the oak tree at the left to perhaps balance the mass of the dome a bit.

The taller group of trees at the left might be viewed as providing some similar balance to the mass along the left side of the frame.

You have avoided a common problem with midday shots of this type, in that the foreground snow does not blow out to completely white.

By some miracle, you managed to get this shot with no one standing in the meadow! :-)

What doesn't work as well for me:

I think that there isn't a whole lot of subject interest at the right and left edges of the frame. I might have considered moving a bit to the left when taking the shot and then cropping it to perhaps a 4:3 ratio rather than the very wide 3:2 ratio that probably came out of your camera. Alternately I might have kept the camera position and cropped out the right shoulder of the peak and the trees at the far right, even to the point of ending up with a 5:4 ratio between width:height.

The lighting conditions were very tough. It is surprisingly hard to get well-lit shots of Half Dome during the middle of the day. Here your challenges included the fact that the face is in shade, the shoulder is both covered with very bright snow and in full sun, the sky is completely blue (e.g. no clouds), and the light on the face picks up a lot of blue from the sky. To work with this I would consider masking the shaded are of the face and altering the color balance and/or saturation to reduce the blue and also working with curves/levels to bring up a bit of the detail. Or, better yet, come back later in the day when the light comes around to the west a bit more.

There is something odd with the sky texture. I haven't checked your EXIF, but it looks like this may have been shot in jpg on a point and shoot camera? In any case, there is some odd texture in the sky that you might be able to reduce with some Photoshop trickery I won't elaborate on here.

The shot seems a bit too saturated to me, especially the greens and blues.

In sum, there are some laudable aspects in the photo and I hope that the "doesn't work for me" comments may be useful to you.

Take care,

Dan

Effective mountaineering shot. Not a lot different from many other similar photos of such subjects, but it really communicates both the coldness of the environment and the height up in this cleft.

Dan

Not the sort of shot that gets much attention on PN, I'm afraid - but I like it quite a bit. (Which is a bit surprising, since I'm usually not a fan of cutesy tilted shots... :-)

There is something compelling about the mirror in front of the child's face and the parallels between trike and car along with the obvious compositional connection between the round forms of the mirror and the tire.

Dan

Very nicely done. The colors are wonderful, as is the composition.

Dan