Critique Style Requested: Standard
The photographer is looking for generalized feedback about the aesthetic and technical qualities of their image.
Description
This image was made on the CA coast near a lighthouse, which was behind me and lighting up small buildings and the fence above the sea. I decided to make this small building the foreground of the image as no interesting natural elements were present. I liked the contrast of the tiny building and the immense sky.
Technical Details
ISO 2500, f 2.8, 15 seconds, CANON RF5 with a 24-70 mm lens
The Milky Way shows up very nicely, with pleasing detail, and you found an interesting FG.
The OCD side of me wants to straighten the building, which looks like it is distorted by keystoning from pointing the lens up. You would lose a lot of canvas with an actual perspective correction but you might have room for a little rotation – or you could do that in camera if you shoot the scene again. That would make the fence not level but that’s more believable than a leaning building. The little building is cute and I love the shadow on its side. It does make a very interesting element below the dramatic sky. The hint of ambient light on the FG is very nice.
I like that you cropped the top to give more emphasis to the galactic center, as the MW gets less interesting above this area. (I’m assuming from the keystoning that the bottom part is as framed and the crop was from the top. That removes the area where the lens was probably giving more distorted stars, too.) Stopping down a little can help with some lens distortions (and it can vary with different lenses) but the noise may not be a good tradeoff.
It looks like the stars may not have been perfectly focused – that can be difficult to evaluate without being tethered to a laptop, but with the R5 you can zoom in to view a capture and re-focus and re-shoot. It looks like noise reduction might have gone farther than it needed to – that camera has super fine grain noise. The image is very strong and worth another look for noise reduction.
Hi Diane,
Thanks so much for this super helpful critique. I will definitely work on the image and incorporate your suggestions. Much to learn.
Irene
Welcome to a very large club!! You have good dark skies there – a good playground when the marine layer fog is pushed offshore.
