This photograph was taken during a trip to the Mauricie National Park (Quebec, Canada). I tried to focus on this stone with a little leaf in balance on it.
For a long time, I was passionate with taking photographs of cities and portraits. I still am but what I prefer now is to walk in nature, to wander and to pick landscapes that catch my eyes. The element I am the most attracted to is water, especially when it meets with plants and minerals. The profusion of details, the delicacy of colors and the endless light possibilities are very exciting.
What technical feedback would you like if any?
Any
What artistic feedback would you like if any?
Any
Pertinent technical details or techniques:
(If this is a composite, etc. please be honest with your techniques to help others learn)
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Welcome, Enzo. What a wonderful first post. This is lovely! The warm to cool tones give a nice sense of depth, and the squiggly reflections are perfect. I was thinking that cropping to 4:5-ish, cutting off the reflections on the right, would be nice, but I donât know - probably would be unbalanced. Perhaps just cloning out that rock and bright orange bits in the URC (if youâre ok with that sort of thing) would be good; they are a bit distracting. Or just burning them down.
Welcome to NPN, Enzo. Great eye to see the possibilities in this scene, and capture it so wonderfully. I did see where a couple of small edits might help so I downloaded it and made those changes, which you are free to accept or discard. First, I cropped a little all around - cropped most of the rock in the upper right, cropped the line of leaves in the upper left, cropped the bottom just a wee bit to move the bottom border a little closer to the branch reflections to reduce a little negative space, and then just a tiny bit on top to retain perspective. I then cloned the remainder of the upper right rock and tiny little âbitsâ of brighter color around that area, cloned a few errant spots here and there, a leaf or two on the upper left, and then flattened it and ran the image through Topaz Denoise AI, not so much for noise, but because it also has a nice sharpening algorithm as well. The original appeared in need of just a little sharpening. I also increased the overall contrast just a wee amount to make those branch reflections pop a bit more. Posting the results below. Again, excellent vision to see this, and I canât wait to see more from you.
Dear Bonnie,
Thank you very much for your critique and your encouragement !
I sometimes do postprocessing on Lightroom. I will change the orange bits in the URC to see what improvement I can get, thank you for the advice.
Thank you very much Bill for having taking the time to download the image and edit it. It doesnât bother me at all, especially because all your suggestions improve a lot my photography. The cropping is much better and having sharpened a little the orignal gives it more strenght.
I just have one question, because my english is not perfect yet : what does mean cloning ?
Think of cloning as replacing a small piece of an image with another piece. In your image, I used one of Photoshopâs tools, the clone stamp, to remove a bothersome leaf and replace it with a small copy of nearby water. With a clone stamp, you basically âgrabâ a section of the image and then use that section to place over the section you want to hide. I linked a video of how to use it below. Itâs in english so I hope you can understand it.
