I'm an aspiring photographer, so any helpful critiques are greatly appreciated. Here's a shot I took this afternoon, of some steam coming from a man hole. Something not un-common in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
The exteme differences in exposure between the steam area and left are problematic.
The light is area is distracting to the dark area which has the subject - steam
I think you need a different angle with just the shaded area.
I don't have a problem w/ the highkey are and the steam area at all I would actually enhance it like many other great photographers in the past did. Check out for instance Daido Moriyama, or Robert Frank, or...well you get the idea. Aesthetically I think it would be more elegant to tighten up the top portion of it. This is best done at the point of shooting rather than croping it.
I think you need to find a better subject. This one didn't work out too well. I can do all the blah blah about lighting and framing and things like that,but it won't change anything.
And the copyright sign..I think it's too early in your career to worry about your images being stolen.
I'm with Scott on this one, but if you want to keep this view then crop the clutter off the very top part to prevent it capturing our attention, which is all the more likely when text is involved.
Sarah:
You have a good eye for identifying something interesting to capture. All you need to do is experiment.
If I were looking at that shot, I would have gotten much lower on the ground and shot it from different angles. I would have also bracketed exposure and f-stop to have more to work from in post processing.
