gdanmitchell Offline Upload & Sell: Off
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#1: In this small presentation (though too big for me to see at once on my laptop screen!) the blend looks great to me. I look for artifacts around the edge of trees and cliff (considering the possibility of a hard selection to define the areas) and for awkward gradients (when the blend is done with masks and a feathered brush), but I don't see any here. So, nice work with the blend. It may just be my own personal preferences coming through, but I might consider a bit of selective (masked) work with curves to possibly brighten some areas of the darker foreground. Oh, and the photograph seems to tilt to the right - look at that slender tree in front of the monolith and a bit to the left and I think you'll see it.
(Back again, and now on a larger monitor. I think I may see a bit of an unnatural gradient around the rock in the water near the lower part of the frame, and perhaps the lower section of El Cap looks a bit unnaturally light. For the former, if I'm right, a trick you can try is to do whatever adjustments you need to do on the rock and other things at the bottom of the from, then create a soft mask to define the area of the effect, but keep the boundaries of the mask inside the area your are working. We're much less likely to see that introduced gradient there than if it ends up in the water, since our eyes/brain "know" that the water shouldn't have that gradient. If you see what I see on the lower part of El Cap, you might try to apply a slight curve, masked to that area, to compensate.)
#2: This is a tricky scene and a difficult composition. That bit of foreground color - a cottonwood? - is a very attractive thing, especially backed by the darker evergreen trees and then the bulk of El Cap. And who isn't attracted to the beautiful golden hour light slanting across the granite? However, for me there are a few things that make it less successful than a couple of the other photographs you have posted. I feel like there are perhaps too many conflicting primary subjects - is it the yellow tree at the bottom, the beautiful expanse of granite between the trees, or the light on the upper face? And in the case of the yellow tree and the light on the upper face, the fact that both are cut off seems to argue against them being the primary subjects - they sort of feel to me like they aren't all quite there. To be honest, this is one tough composition. I've also found myself attracted to such scenes and their real beauty while standing there, and then found them challenging to pull off as a photograph. (To answer your specific question directly, to me it does feel cut off at the top and at the bottom. YMMV.)
You didn't ask about it, but I like your #4 quite a bit. It has a bit of an unconventional composition, which helps me regard it as an abstraction rather than as a purely real image of ice. The bit of blue at the lower right is a striking surprise. (As is so often the case, there is beauty everywhere in that Valley once you start looking around and down. :-)
Take care,
Dan
Edited on Nov 17, 2013 at 09:37 PM · View previous versions
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