The photographer is looking for generalized feedback about the aesthetic and technical qualities of their image.
Description
You seldom see the sky while walking in a forest. This time I looked down into a quiet pool - and saw layers of the lifecycle of the forest: the fallen leaves, the stones and mud, the sheltering bracken and the patch of sunlight through the canopy.
Specific Feedback
I am a novice with post processing and use only Lightroom. Any advice that can be offered on how to bring out more detail in the stream bed would be appreciated. Plus any other pointers that come to mind. Many thanks.
Technical Details
Sony RX100 M6. 1/20 sec, f2.8, ISO 200.
Edited in Lightroom
Very original take on layers. It’s like looking into a deep well into another world below ground. I like the yellow leaves sprinkled around and the way you’ve framed the scene with the ferns. I would like to see more of the scene at the bottom without the end of the water cut off and you could then crop some off the top maybe. Perhaps it wasn’t possible to do so. Anyway, nice take.
What a cool scene. I love things like this in the woods. Unexpected and so more interesting when you do happen upon one. Sometimes I find frogs in them which is a bonus.
When you say more detail in the stream bed, do you mean under the surface or the reflection? Getting cameras to focus below water surfaces is tough - I’ve tried it for shooting crayfish and it was hit or miss a lot of the time. So for this if you didn’t get a photo with the bottom of the pool in focus, I don’t think you can fake that.
In the field to get more visibility down there you will need a polarizer to cut the glare and reduce the reflection. These only work at specific angles to the sun so its position and yours relative to it is key as well.
The sharpness and detail you have in the plants and everything else looks good to me and there is plenty of contrast. The bottom edge looks a bit haphazard to me so you could try a more panoramic crop keeping just the middle bright parts of the photo if you wanted. The ferns do a good job of framing, but the log at the top is not balanced by anything else at the bottom so that seems less than optimal to me.
What a lovely scene. I would have stopped, too. Kris has good pointers in her reply. If you want to see detail below the water surface, you’ll need to use a polarizer. I didn’t think you could attach one to your RX100, but I googled it and see there is an adapter for that. Usually when I photograph scenes like this I experiment both with and without a polarizer to see what shakes out. You can get quite different results with and without.
This is a great take for the layers theme - the actual plants, the ground, the rocks, the water surface, and the reflections.
