Passing By, Looking On
by banmorn

Comment:
The more I look at it, the more I like it. I like all the different faces looking in different directions, especially the girl on the advertisement to the right. In fact, she does a good job competing with your main subject for my attention. If I could change one aspect, it would be to get rid of the big fellow in the black shorts and t-shirt. All of that solid black carries a lot of visual weight, and the fact that he's walking away from the camera makes him even more of a distraction. Might have been more effective with a smaller person walking towards the camera, if you had the opportunity to weight.

Communique
by HarveyG

Comment:
Beautiful shot, made more beautiful by the Dire Straits reference (hopefully it was intentional). They had an album and song called Communiqué, but this shot is a dead ringer for the cover of their live album On The Night which ironically doesn't feature the song Communiqué.

I'm Swamped
by dtremain

Comment:
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Sorry, my dog must've stepped on my keyboard!

This quote was always one of my favorites, nicely done.

Message edited by author 2012-10-24 09:16:37.

Pond at Parker Meadow
by craigdm

Comment:

Originally posted by hahn23: A good scene. I find my eyes searching the shore for a subject. On my monitor, the reflection in the water is quite bright, which seems a bit unnatural. The clouds above the tree line are plain. The trees and leaves are detailed and appear to be in focus, but seem to clutter. I do like your effort at controling detail in the shadows.

Thank you for the comment, hahn23! The bright reflections could be a result of the HDR, but then again the water was calm and the reflections awfully strong in person as well. I couldn't agree more on the cluttered leaves and lack of a subject, I just felt many of the options available to me for a subject in the area would have meant a tight frame on relatively small objects. I decided to keep it a little wider to hopefully stay in the spirit of Ansel Adams.

Any success at controlling detail in the shadows was probably a happy accident!

Pond at Parker Meadow
by craigdm

Comment:

Originally posted by PennyClick: It is unfortunate that this has been submitted with a width of less than 800 pixels, the max allowable for a landscape format image. You can ask in the forums if you need advice on saving your images for a challenge.

Penny, thanks for commenting. I'm a beginner, typically I've been doing the adjustments on the raw image, then converting to JPEG at the highest quality and then reducing the image size until the file size is under 300k and long dimension is less than 800px. I do the conversion at highest quality to avoid compression artifacts. To me, this particular photo seems to have a lot of high frequency components (sharp black-to-white transitions), which is difficult for JPEG compression to handle. I believe that in order to keep the file size under the limit, and minimize artifacts, the image size naturally needs to come down.

Originally posted by PennyClick: There is a lot of detail here but it appears over-sharpened.

I don't recall how much sharpening I applied, so you may be correct. This was also my first HDR attempt, so the oversharpening probably came from my misuse experimentation of the sliders in photomatix.

Originally posted by PennyClick: The picture also lack the tonal range typically found in Ansel Adams's pictures. However, this is a peaceful looking setting with nice reflections.

Would you mind elaborating a little more? The reason I went with the HDR in the first place was specifically to try achieve the wide tonal range. Based on what I read of the zone system, the two tonal extremes are 0 (pure black with no texture or detail) and 10 (pure white with no texture or detail). I thought I hit a 10 in the clouds just above and to the right of center, and hit a 0 in the shadows beneath the trees along the waters edge. The trees and leaves are admittedly very cluttered, but it seemed to me that they also hit almost every other tone.