Hello everyone! My name is Kevin, and I just recently added myself to this Landscape and Nature Photography Group. I have been adding some CC to some of the latest posts as a way of being part of the community and now I hope to get some CC as well.
This particular image was a snapshot taken on a Fuji x10. After uploading this image to my computer I pretty much forgot about it until a few months ago when I was culling some of my images. As of yet, it has to votes with 1.5 stars. I actually rather like this image, but that could just be my bias as I took the image, and have fond memories of this particular adventure in the California, Trinity Alps. I just thought I would post it here and hopefully get some CC explaining what is good, what is bad, and what I could have done different to make the image better. Thanks!
-Kevin
It is hard to be dispationate about one's own photos, especially if they have an emotional component.
So let's have a think about basics.
The picture is suffering from almost bleached out highlights. So it is over exposed, this never looks good. The dark forest in the shade of the mountain has a little detail although it seems to be poluted with UV light, a common problem in the mountains and sometimes by the sea, too. A UV filter would have been very helpful on your lens. Darkening your exposure would have made the forest very/too dark but this is almost always preferable to bleached highlights. The best solution is to use a camera with a very high dynamic range, such as a Nikon D810, which offeres about 4 times the dynamic range of most cameras. It also has very high resolution although this is a secondary benefit. For landscapes DR is the number one priority, by a country mile. I assume you shot RAW, which, regardless of the cameras DR capability is vital, as it captures the max DR the camra is capable of seeing and landscapes can have enormous Dr.
Lighting, Not entirely frontal but still a bit frontal, and this is rarely attractive, especially if over exposed.
White balance. Your photograph looks very blue, partly down to UV but with a sky like that and especially in the mountains the colour temperature might have been well in excess of 10,000 degrees kelvin. So if you had the white balance set to daylight/circa 5600 degrees kelvin you would get a blue/cold look, which in daylight situations will not sit right with a full sun daylight scene. In a scene like this one should have warm tones in the full sun areas and cold blues in the shade, which will be lit by the blue sky not the orange sun.
Composition; In general you have a good composition but I think it would have looked better wider, to convey the size of the wilderness. Cropping like this has made it look small, despite the high mountains, which suggest a big wild space. Obviously, I don't know if there was anything undesireable just out of frame. Unfortunately, the above have combined to make it look like a cheap post card, which is a shame.
I hope that helps you understand why your scores may have been unremarkable
Hey Ian, thanks for the feedback. I must say, it's nice to finally get some good feedback. I've been in a couple photo classes where people seem to afraid to critique a photo and just say things like, it looks nice, wow, great, and so on. Although some feedback does twist a knot, it's worth it to hear in order to improve our work as photographers.
Unfortunately, the camera I used wasn't able to give me a lot of dynamic range. Those x10 sensors don't leave too much to fool around with. With that being said, I never really thought of the highlights to be too much of a problem until you pointed that out. Thanks for the info on the UV filter. I never really knew UV light effected images so much in mountainous and coastal areas (good to know). Maybe I'll try to play with this photo some more and see if there is any more room to pull highlights, and push the shadows, as well as mess with the white balance. I'm not sure when, but I am planning to return to these mountains in the next few years. Maybe I'll try this shot again with a wider lens, and a better camera.
Thanks again for your honest critique. It has been an uncomfortable breath of fresh air that I needed!
I am sorry it was uncomfortable but glad you feel you have learned something.
Many people just say wow or I really like that ro someother comment that completely fails to advance one's knowledge and skill. In sme cases they will not know any more or less than you but in other cases they are just being lazy. There is such a lot of truth in the old phrase, " there are no lengths to which people will not go to avoid the true labbour of thinking."
If you remember nothing else from my comments, remember this, expose digital for the highlights. Get them to look right and the whole image will look right.
If you change your camera, and have landscapes in mind, you can't buy too much dynamic range.
There is a limit to the degree an over-exposed JPEG can be adjusted. But I have had a play and if you have the RAW file you should be able to do a much better job than I have managed. But for encouragement, I attach the result I have achieved.
I darkened it, added warmth to the highlights and mid tones and a touch of blue cyan to the dark tones. I then added a subtle vignette and several ND grads, top and bottom. You may prefer less of these effects, obviously. I don't say this is now a master piece but as a guide to what can be done and some approaches you might consider I hope it helps. Remember, to see any FStoppers image at its best, click on it, so as to get a dark background page. The white page always seems to kill the image's sparkle. That took two minutes and I think with another few mins and the RAW files you could find you are much happier.
Finally, is your monitor calibrated? If not you are never going to have control of your images. I kid you not. Calibration is totally vital, for every kind of photography, if you care about how it looks, and it is clear you do care. The good news is that calibration is not expensive. And when you consider it will effect the quality of every image you edit, the small cost becomes massive value.
In Photoshop this file was more golden, in other words the colour here has gained blue, compared to what I produced.
Hi Kevin,
I've just been reading this thread and have a few suggestion that build on what Ian has mentioned. But first, Ian has made a very good point regarding monitor calibration. Not only is this vital to produce accurate colours, but it will also make sure that your monitor is at the correct brightness for your working conditions - if your monitor is too bright, then you'll over compensate and produce dark images, and vice versa.
If you're heading back there, then there are a number of things you can do to improve your image, straight out of the camera - the less we have to do in post processing, the better. Firstly, consider the time of day. The sun still appears reasonably high in your image. This is creating strong highlights and deep shadows - the high dynamic range that Ian mentions. Shooting with a lower sun (golden hour) will create softer highlights and reduce the dynamic range of the scene, thus helping your camera out.
Secondly,regardless of the time of day, I would also try exposure bracketing (a tripod would be very useful). Even the best cameras will struggle to capture a high dynamic scene in one shot. By having multiple exposures, you can blend the best exposure from different parts of the scene. Lightroom has an ok HDR function, but I generally don't like the "HDR" effect. If you've access to Photoshop (or Affinity on the Mac), then you can blend the images more naturally by overlaying the exposures and using selective masks.
Thirdly, don't forget to use selective, localised adjustments - dodging and burning certain areas can really make an image "pop". Global adjustments will only get you so far.
Hope this is helpful to you,
Cheers!
Thanks for the tips Stephen. When I return here, I'll definitely keep your suggestions in mind.
I am surprised that the version I posted is much more magenta than the same file on the same screen in Photoshop. Is the JPEG compresion method critical when working on files from FS and then returning them to FS?
Not sure, but check the colour space you exported it with. Anything other than sRGB and colours can get a little unpredictable.
sRGB it is but good idea to check.
The first one is Progressive 5
The second is Optimised
The third is Standard
They do not differ in any other way. And as we can see they look the same as each other but strangely they look very much like the PS version, so not like last time. Odd.
A definite improvement, the magenta was out of control in the first one. Strange why they differ though - I'm out of ideas :oD
Ditto.
Thanks for all the feedback and examples, Ian! I haven't had a chance to mess with my raw file yet, but I'll repost when I do. I do also need to invest in a screen calibration device. Thanks again!