gdanmitchell Offline Upload & Sell: Off
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Jason, nice work.
Since you asked for C&C, here is some.
What I like:
You were there in utterly beautiful conditions! (I was there yesterday, and my friends who had been there late last week kept exclaiming, "You should have been here on Friday!" (or was it Saturday) and "I've never seen the colors so beautiful!" and "the play of light and cloud was absolutely stunning" or "it was 'Charlie* light' all day!")
You have done a wonderful job of portraying the light and color in ways that are thoroughly believable to this long-time Yosemite visitor. It is tempting to crank up the saturation slider to levels that seem well over-done, but you have used some discretion in this regard. You have also done a fine job, I think, of handling the extremes of the dynamic range of your scenes. With the understandable exception of the undersides of some of the river rocks, you have done an admirable job of letting shadows hold light and detail, and (with the exception of a few spots of snow on top of those same rocks) you have avoided blown out highlights.
The light in the third photograph is really wonderful.
What I might try differently:
In your vertical format images, I sometimes feel like there may not be quite enough in the upper and lower extremes of the scenes to "fill" the full vertical space. If the first photograph were mine, I might consider a crop at the top that removed that bit of blue sky and reduced the amount of "empty" space up there - much like you did in the second, horizontal format version. I might also crop a bit at the very bottom, perhaps going so far as to remove the very brightest spots of snow on those rocks. I feel somewhat the same about that third photograph, with its very beautiful light. If it were mine, I would almost certainly crop a chunk off the top of the frame - there isn't a lot going on in that low-contrast area of the upper cliff, and its mass makes the beautiful core of the scene smaller by comparison. I'm less certain about the bottom - I might at least take a bit off there, though I can also see leaving the some amount of those leaves floating in the reflective water.
The final scene is, of course, an iconic one in the valley. However, in many ways I think of that row of beautiful trees (cottonwoods, I think?) as being central to that scene - yet you cut the lower border of the scene right through the middle of the trees. I would either eliminate them entirely or (better, I think) expand the composition to include the trees down to their trunks.
Having said all of that, you seem to have a way with this light. :-)
Dan
*Charles "Charlie" Cramer
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