The photographer is looking for generalized feedback about the aesthetic and technical qualities of their image.
Description
Light being reflected off of the face of the water and also through raindrops on the outside of the glass window. Taken from a moving car, traveling about 50 mph, at precisely the right angle to catch these rays of light striped across the lake water.
Kourtney, welcome to NPN and the Weekly Challenge. This is a good looking sunset view out your car window. Getting the sun as it drops below the trees is good timing and lets both the reflected sunlight and the crepuscular ray (angling right) show well. In many cases the distortion from the drops on the window would be considered flaws, but since you want the story to be about looking out the car window they help make that point clear. I would suggest cropping out the window frame on the right and at the bottom, although that makes the “looking out the car window” less apparent. BTW (after a 40 year career in Optical Physics), the distortion from the drops on the window is called refraction (not reflection, )
Thank you for sharing your take on my photo, I really appreciate it! Honestly, I would not consider this photo to be one of my best, but it so accurately fit the criteria for the challenge. I knew this photo captured several different types of “reflection”, but I did not know exactly how to describe them. Thank you for clarifying for me the difference between refraction and reflection. Before choosing this photo, I was thinking about submitting a photo that I took of a spiderweb glistening. It was taken at night with a flashlight shining on it. Would that be an example of reflection or refraction?
Your spiderweb glistening idea sounds good. If the light source is close to the camera, then it’s most likely reflection. As the angle between the light, the web and the camera gets bigger, it will become refraction and the brightness of the web will change with the camera angle. (probably oversharing here…) A few years ago I got spider web photos showing out of focus colors throughout the web. In my case the sun was behind the web at an angle and the colors changed with the angle. I’m pretty sure those were refraction (not diffraction…to add another scientific term to your vocabulary… ). Several other NPNers have also posted photos of spider webs showing colors.
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