natures luge
by mrturtell

Comment by JacksonGariety:
Here's your feedback from the DPChallenge Critique Club! :D

Wow, this is a great view! I'd love to know where this was taken! The landscape is beautiful, but the lighting in the photo is a bit flat. If you could have captured this with more light shining on the trees and waterfall, it would have a much brighter mood to it. While the snow is overexposed, the waterfall and the trees are very dark and boring. That's the biggest problem here. Also, there is no directly apparent subject, and the trees take up too much of the photo for there to be one. On the other hand, the waterfall was framed very nicely by the trees and brings this photo from a 4 up to a 4.8. it would also be nice to see either a bit more sky or no sky at all. The little sliver of clouds you have at the top of the photo don't really do much right now.

Hope that was helpful to you!

- ColemanGariety
The DPChallenge Critique Club

rumble in the jungle
by mrturtell

Comment by Ja-9:
it seems that you need just a bit more contrast with this...it seems to be a little flat in tone

rumble in the jungle
by mrturtell

Comment by kellmak10:
nice picture...IMO it might be even better with a little more light and focus on the eggs

counting my blessings
by mrturtell

Comment by MinsoPhoto:
Greetings from the Critique Club

First Impressions:

As mentioned in your comments, it is really far too dark.

Technical (Comp, lighting, color, focus, Processing):

As far as the exposure issue I believe the commenters covered that pretty well so I will go over the other technical aspects.

The composition on this is fine, I like how you didn’t center the main subject however there is a lot of open space and a lot going on that I feel takes away from the main subjects. I would suggest getting in close to the people and really filling most of the frame with them. This setup is great to use for story telling but between the landscape, fishing hole, rods and sled it is a bit much. Perhaps center on the 2 people just walking in the snow or the older person pulling the kid on the sled or even kneeling down together holding a fishing rod.

Challenge:

Meets the challenge well and will relate well with those with children/grandchildren.

Artistic/Emotion:

This had the potential for a great emotion shot but unfortunately fell flat.

Summary:

The biggest thing that hurt you was the exposure. This would have probably been a solid 5 if properly exposed. But you live and learn and now you can only go up (hopefully) Keep practicing and having fun and enter as much as you can and you will learn and grow. There are many great resources on the internet about exposure and learning to use a digital camera that are excellent. And if you ever have questions you can always stop by the forums and someone will likely be able to help you out.

natures luge
by mrturtell

Comment by LonnieD:
Bit centred but beautiful.

natures luge
by mrturtell

Comment by herfotoman:
Trees obscure too much to enjoy the picture

natures luge
by mrturtell

Comment by FourPointX:
great title beautiful shot 7

counting my blessings
by mrturtell

Comment by Yo_Spiff:
What Waddy says is correct. Bright snow, water and sand can completely fool an auto exposure system, because it does not know that the scene really IS that bright and it is trying to make a normal exposure out of it.

There is no substitute for getting a shot right in the camera, but there ARE some things you can do in post processing to help save such an exposure. I took a screen grab of your entry and did a levels adjustment on it.

What this adjustment does is it allows you to tell it what the brightest and darkest levels are in the image and then stretches the dynamic range of the image to match. If you look at the left hand thumbnail in this levels dialog (Your original image), you can see that the histogram is totally flat on the right side, which is the lighter tones. I then set the highlights slider (the white diamond shape) to match up with the brightest point for which the histogram shows there is detail. You can see the expected result in the righthand thumbnail preview. I went and pasted the after histogram into this so that you can see what the histogram looks like after the adjustment. The dynamic range has now been expanded to fill the available range, which lightens up the image and making the details more visible.

I also applied a modest amount of tonemapping using PaintShop Pro's clarify adjustment in order to bring out a little more detail from the dark figures, and then sharpened the photo a bit.


Hope this helps some.

natures luge
by mrturtell

Comment by jayzundel:
The luge is way cool

natures luge
by mrturtell

Comment by Luci11e:
nice shot; good job of framing the waterfall with the trees;