Hello everyone. Came here to learn and joining a community like this surely will help.
This is my first landscape and I just wanted to know your thoughts. I really think I had (have?) the parts of something here but I know I missed the mark somehow. The river and pebbles on the bottom, the rocky orange hills and the huge white Andes in the background.
Hope I can contribute to the community and feel free to comment. Thanks everyone!
Your shot is pretty good. I'm not very far ahead of you, Eduardo, but I think my workshop instructors (2) would say there is no need to include all that featureless blue sky. Also, when you did, you left little tufts of white cloud that would have to be eliminated if you didn't crop out most of the blue sky. Something I am trying to learn to do every time is to put a foreground object close to the camera so there is depth. The red rocks serve to add depth as does the rock in shadow on the right. It seems to be nicely processed and composed.
Hi Eduardo and welcome,
That looks like an amazing location.
Prefacing my comments by saying that this is just what I would do, and that everyone is likely to have different ideas.
I'd crop out the gravel in the foreground, and potentially the bits of cloud at the top.
Also, as it stands, I would rotate the image counter clockwise to be aligned with the line between the gravel and the grass - that urge would likely disappear if the gravel was cropped out.
And I would also pull back the highlights on the formation in the left foreground and raise the saturation a touch.
I really like the low contrast rendering of the mountains in the background.
Recognising that I'm ignorant of the physical constraints in the location. I would have shot to the left of the image, not including the cliff line that is intruding on the right of frame, and including more of the formation on the left of frame (which is really interesting).
In any case, I don't see your image as a failure by any measure, and I think that it just needs a little bit of work in post :)
Looks like a great spot to work with, but probably just needs a different composition. I'd try a few things. For one, getting down lower to the ground and incorporation more foreground interest with the river stones leading up to the mountain in the back. Also some tighter compositions with more focus on just a portion of the area (see the crops I made form your image - hope you don't mind). The dark rocks to the right are distracting but they have a nice shape that could work w different lighting. Just keep trying and move around a lot. I notice you have the image cropped into your profile bar and I think it looks pretty good like that.
Great picture! It makes me wish I was in the place where you took it! That is joy of landscape or travel pictures, in my opinion. If I had taken this I would probably try two simple edits in lightroom. 1 crop the picture from top a bit as others have suggested. Maybe place the mountain ridge closer to 1/3 from the top. 2 I would use the graduated filter pulled down from the top and adjusting the exposure down, dehaze to maybe 10 and bring temperature down (adding blue). I like dark skies over pastel. There is a lot going in the picture with the multiple shadows but if you play around a bit with cropping and some edits you might be surprised at what results.
Location look s very promisingly and beautiful!
Was there a chance to use the river as a leading line to the red rocks on the left? I mean try different vantage point.
Here there is too much stuff in the frame but its kind of empty at the same time to me. A dark rock on the right takes too much space not giving anything to the picture + top third is empty skies.