Lighting The Wayby
atsxusComment by Bear_Music: ***CRITIQUE CLUB RESPONSE***
Compositionally, there's nothing much to quibble with here; 1/2 degree counterclockwise rotation would square up the verticals nicely.
Likewise, the decorations themselves seem "photographable" for sure.
Your problems are technical. "Lights at night" are hard to do well. If you cruise the results of this challenge, you'll see that most of the similar entrants ran into the same problem you did: amorphous black surround with dots of lights popping out. What's the best way around it? Shoot at twilight, in early evening, get some detail in the sky so it's not totally black. A few of the night-light entrants managed this very well.
There's evidently at least one tree, left-center in front of the house. If this tree were separated from a slightly less-dark sky, you'd have a vastly improved image.
At the photoshop level, this might benefit from some fiddling withhue/saturation sliders as well, to get some more chromatic pop. Give it a try...
Robt.
Photographer found comment helpful.
