Except for the Rip Van Winkle Bridge in the background, this view of the Hudson River in New York State is pretty much what the famous explorer Henry Hudson saw in 1609 when he set anchor in what is now Catskill, New York, his first landing place in the New World, and pretty much the base of operations of what became known as the Hudson River School of painting, which includes artists such as Frederic Church and Thomas Cole. The land right near the water's edge is fill, as this was reclaimed from what was a local dump until the 1960s.
It was taken around 8:30 in the morning this July. I was captivated by the peacefulness and by by the light with its scattered mist while I was waiting for a small local weekly event to take place, easily within walking distance of my home. I didn't have a "real" camera yet - not since my 35 mm film days - and took this with my moderately low-end Android cell phone. I'd only recently started taking digital pictures and didn't even know how to adjust the exposure on it yet. For steadiness, I braced myself against a tree. I didn't do anything to the picture afterwards; much as I love working with computers, I don't have the patience for returning to photos I took and doing computer editing. I would rather compose to the best of my ability while I take the shot. I've missed the "money shot" many times because of this method, but that's how I prefer to work.
Speaking of the lighting, I was furious when I went to access the photo collections I had recently started accumulating at Amazon Photos and Google Photos as a means of backing up. When I opened the app to show my photos to a friend, I was confronted immediately with a full-screen photograph that I didn't immediately recognize. It was tickling something in my memory and I suddenly realized what the problem was. The photo was this contest submission photo, but with a haze filter superimposed over every inch of my photograph, including over the mist near the bridge, creating a shallow image that might have been taken through a wet shower curtain. Accompanying the alteration was the explanation that they could improve all my photographs this way. Nowhere was there any obvious way to undo the damage or opt out of any "helpful hints." I sent a nastygram expressing my displeasure. I was especially upset because my friend assumed that this altered image was my own doing and therefore something I was inexplicably proud of. (Both Amazon photos and Google Photos have done this type of thing to my photographs. One of those two companies obliterated the center of what I considered to be a perfectly lit photograph with an irremovable pop-up requiring me to click on it that simply said "Fix lighting.")
[I just bought a Fujifilm FTX-5, recommended to me because of the way I like to work, and I expect to spend the next year learning my way around it. I am puzzled that the FTX-5 is not considered a "professional camera." I am certainly not an Henri Cartier-Bresson and never will be, but I work with the same philosophies he did and am positive he would have loved the FTX-5. Maybe it's considered "unprofessional" because it doesn't emphasize video. Henri Cartier-Bresson didn't emphasize video either.]