Looking for another round of critiques. You guys really helped me improve my work last time. Reworks are very welcome!

1. Forked Mountain Falls (something seems off to me on this one)

I love water scenes, I do these all the time myself. The problem is they are really quite common and if the scene itself is not perfect, it is hard to make an image as good as other stuff we see, no matter how good we do our job.

The foam in the first scene is unattractive. So is the bare rock/earth in the background.

3 and 4 and 6 are my fav here, but they also have some messy areas.

2 and 5 do not appeal to me because of the shallow dof. It seems to me that if you want part of your scene out of focus, you need to make it creamy.

Took a stab at it.

Diggin' the lines.
Crop & some WB tweaking to pull out a bit of blue. Also some selective gamma & desat tweaks.

This works, you eliminated the clutter and maximized the points of interest.

@RustyBug Much improved on those crops, thanks!

@Ben I think you're absolutely right about the with trying to make an imperfect scene meet expectations. I love trying to capture the essence of my location, but that's a challenge I'm trying to overcome.
- The rock above the falls in #1 were quite amazing, but I'm not sure that they work in the scene here. I'm going to play with the cropping some more here to see what I can do. It may be that the rock formation and waterfall just don't work in a composition.
- The DOF on #5 was my fault. I didn't focus far enough in to get it all in focus.

I've been doing landscapes for only a few real shoots so far. So far I've learned a ton each time!

@RustyBug The shots were taking in a totally overcast, misty day. The colors were actually quite blue / green. Still though, I like your warmed tones much better on those shots.

T-D-S wrote:
@RustyBug Much improved on those crops, thanks!

@Ben I think you're absolutely right about the with trying to make an imperfect scene meet expectations. I love trying to capture the essence of my location, but that's a challenge I'm trying to overcome.
- The rock above the falls in #1 were quite amazing, but I'm not sure that they work in the scene here. I'm going to play with the cropping some more here to see what I can do. It may be that the rock formation and waterfall just don't work in a composition.
- The DOF on #5 was my fault. I didn't focus far enough in to get it all in focus.

I've been doing landscapes for only a few real shoots so far. So far I've learned a ton each time!

I work at finding pictures from local areas, it's good training but these days the scenes themselves need to be really great or the light something special. I find all my local places have dead trees, brush in the water, dirty water etc. Last week I went back to one place that was clean and found that the water had been turned off

You posted so many images I will just comment briefly on two of them. I like the colors and feel of #3 the best. #4 is my second favorite. I think my interest is in the bottom and would suggest cropping off about the upper 25% of the image.

T-D-S wrote:
@RustyBug The shots were taking in a totally overcast, misty day. The colors were actually quite blue / green. Still though, I like your warmed tones much better on those shots.

Yup, you've nailed all the issues with these images right here. The light in these images is uninteresting.

If you're stuck with natural light you're going to be revisiting these locations again and again to find good light.
(They look like good spots for a bit of light painting though )

Maybe a cheat - cut and paste, crop, dodge and burn?