Pls critique

[Peakbagr]

I'd be interested in opinions on imporving how this image was taken or how to improve or crop it. It was much larger and sharper before resizing to fit here.

Thanks

 

[Mark Schaefer]

Alan, I like the photo very much. It captures the mood of the Catskills quite well. The exposure is very pleasing. You have some diagonal, steamy shafts of light on the right which are quite attractive. These are often called god beams by photographers.

I would probably crop a bit off the top, perhaps up to 20% of the vertical. Don't lose those god beams though. Possibly the shot might have been framed in the camera with a bit more of the ferns and a less of the sky on top, perhaps by kneeling down to keep the vertical trees neatly plumb as you have them. You would not want to tilt the camera downward as that would throw the vertical lines of the tree trucks off.

The fallen leaf caught on the fern in the foreground is just a bit of a distraction. Because it is lighter than the forest scene it tends to draw one's eye, and it is not particularly interesting. It could be removed prior to photographing, or possibly just turned over so that the colorful side is up.

Overall a very nice image.

 

[nartreb]

I like Mark's idea of kneeling among the ferns. If you get low enough (maybe even under them), you even can use ferns to frame the image, adding an additional layer of depth to the shot. You could end up with a rather different shot, but I think it'd be a good one.

 

[Peakbagr]

When I saw the leaf, my exact same thought, but the image so pictured the morning and mood, I hadda show it to you.
As you might guess, I'm still struggling with being able to post the photo directly on the thread, used Resizr until it came just under the 107kb. A number of folks have offered a lot of good advice here and in PMs, but alas, getting this to work seems beyond me right now.

 

[Mark Schaefer]

Alan, The photo is below. I found your Kodak gallery photo album link in your trail report. Selected the image. Did a right click on the picture. Selected "properties" from the pop-up menu. Then from the element properties pop-up, swiped and copied the "location" to the clipboard. That is the URL for the jpg of the photo. Then used the insert photo button

from the the reply to thread menu and pasted in the jpg URL. That created the IMG and /IMG tags (with square brackets) around the jpg URL, or you can do it manually. Here it is:

 

[Peakbagr]

Bingo, so simple even I could follow it. Just did the step by step and the image is there in my original post. Thanks to Mark, Doug Paul, Forestnome, Nartreb and others for the advice and PATIENCE.

 

[darren]

Hey, what are you shooting with? You got a digital camera?

- darren