For the "One Star voting trolls" - please feel free to write a comment :) I would love to have your insight.
And for real feedback - please let me know what I could or should have done differently with this photo.
The photo was taken with a Canon 2000d and is a single shot with 75 second exposure on a Kit lens.
for me, this shot is a 'SOLID 2'
it has great potential, the lightning is great, however there are few things distracting to me that stop me from rating it a 3.
the buildings get lost, and for me they are integral to the image.
the lightning looks too fake for me, my suspicion the lightning is all post produced???
the reflection is distracting to me also.
i would love to see your (out of camera exposure) to see how you have edited this for example to understand the final edit...
Actually no, none of the lightning is post-produced, there was a lot of heavy lightning going on that night and I literally have no idea on how to do that.
In regard to the buildings, I actually agree, I also would love to see the buildings completely, didn't want to sacrifice the camera though.
WOW, then you captured some bloody brilliant lightning strikes. They're stunning.
Hmm this is a tough one. I agree with Mark that its a solid 2.
I would first level it, the buildings seem to tilt down from left to right.
Idk how well you know photoshop but exposing for the buildings in a different frame and blending them wouldn't be that difficult.
I also agree with Mark that the bottom reflections are a bit distracting so I would either crop them out or try to get even more of them in the frame and have a more symmetrical composition.
The storm itself is pretty spectacular.
Thanks for the feedback.
My photoshop skills are basically non-existent.
It took me some 4 months to figure out lightrooom to a point were i can kind of use it but still, i haven't figured out things like cropping and so on. So most of my editing is basically done with darktable as i find it more convenient and more intuitive and its a hell lot faster. And to be honest at the point the photo was taken I didn't even figured out darktable, so the edit took me some 3 hours, if i would redo it today, it would take me 5 minutes max. including the little things like having straight lines and so on.
I hate editing... So nowadays I focus more on setting up the camera correctly, using lights more effective - and if I don't like it camera already i will not even try editing small things...
That's fair but learning to edit is a pretty important aspect to photography. Yeah you can get it almost perfect in camera but for the most part you won't, especially outside of studio settings. Definitely takes a while to grasp everything but your pictures will thank you because of it. Anyway, keep trying things out