Conkel’s Hollow is one of the small preserves/parks that makes up the greater Hocking Hills area of Ohio. This photo was taken from the trail that follows the rim of the hollow.
As you can see, it was a cloudy day and there were scattered puffs of clouds low to the tree tops.
Specific Feedback Requested
All of your thoughts are welcomed. Specifically. Is there anything I can do to make this photo (or maybe the next photo) more dynamic?
I think that if I included the rock outcropping I was standing on at the bottom of the photo I could have improved the composition. I did include the rock in the BLC. Do you think adding this element would have helped?
To be honest, I was excited to have the opportunity to photograph this scene with the tree top puffs of clouds. I went away with the feeling that had taken a good photo. After processing, I see my photo as a nice snapshot.
Technical Details
Canon 5D Mark IV | f11 | 1/8s | ISO 100 | EF17-40 @ 40mm
Five shot panorama with camera in the portrait orientation. I cropped off a little of the right to make the photo 2:1
Processed using ACR and Ps. Adjustments were made to the sky and FG separately.
Hi David,
Very nice scenery and low clouds here. Before offering any feedback, may I ask you what the subject of this image is? What exactly (or where) do you want the viewer to ultimately focus on?
Hi Eric,
Thank you for taking the time to provide your input on our photos.
In this photo it’s the changing season / color of the foliage.
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Ok, so that is the theme of it, which I definitely sense. But what area of the scene would you say is the most important to you? What is the visual hierarchy here? What I am getting at is that almost everything is equally accentuated compositionally, so much so that my eye doesn’t know where to rest. It feels like a photograph of “everything” rather than about “something.” I feel it would benefit from some simplification and distilling it down a bit.
Something like this is what I am getting at, just keeping the most significant parts and trimming away all the rest of the unnecessary fat. But this might not be in accordance to your vision with the scene, so it’s only an example, not what I am telling you to do. I also cooled down the white balance because it had a yellow color cast, and removed some of the magenta, then desaturated the greens slightly since the pine trees felt a little too punchy.
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Thanks Eric,
I got to thinking about your initial question and realized that your question answered my basic question. Why does the photo feels like a snapshot?
I love the wide open space of the prairie and high desert; standing on a knoll or hill top and taking in the views. As a result, my landscape photos tend to be wide. This is the only spot on the rim trail where you can see across the hollow, so I naturally went wide.
I have been reading articles about intimate landscapes and would like to move in the that direction. I’ve taken a few intimate landscape photos, but haven’t figured it out yet.
Thank you for your edited photo and providing the changes that you made. I meant to ask about saturation, etc. but forgot. I can see that the colors in your edited photo are more realistic.
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I’m glad I could help you to think about it more and arrive to your own conclusion. The only color work I did was cooling down the white balance. Didn’t touch the saturation but it mellowed out the warm tones here.
