Vermont is unique for many reasons including that, while we have a statehouse with a golden dome, it is the only statehouse with a forested backdrop. It is beautiful all year long but at the height of Fall foliage season it is spectacular. I have photographed it often from various points around the city and this is one of my favorites.
Specific Feedback Requested
Any and all
Technical Details
Pentax K-7, 1/500, f/7.1, 200mm, ISO200 with adjustments to tone curves, slight cropping, noise reduction.
It is always so important to pay attention to light both while capturing a scene and later on while we are editing it. In this image, the top portion of the frame that shows the horizon and the sunlight tells me what kind of lighting you have captured and serves as a reference as to how things “should” be. The way you have brightened up the buildings and the whole bottom half of the image disregards that, being even brighter than the sunlight horizon even though it is in the shade and is not being hit by any sunlight at all. If you don’t work with the light, it will work against you. Therefore, it just simply doesn’t make sense according to the lighting you have captured. This is why including the horizon and sky in an image can actually be very limiting. I can see why you would brighten the bottom portion of the frame, since that is what the image is ultimately about. If you kept it dark in accordance to the lighting in the top portion, it would be very flat and well, too dark to appreciate. What you can do is keep it how it is, but crop out the top part of the frame. It really feels like you have two images here as well. The top half shooting the layers of autumn color, the mountains, the sky. And then the bottom half showing the city nestled within the trees. Compositionally they feel very divided by the empty space in the middle. You could just split this into two scenes if you want, or just get rid of one or the other, depending on what is most important to you. I don’t feel there is anyway to make them work together with this composition you have captured.
@Eric_Bennett I appreciate your taking the time to look at this image and respond. While the light was not exactly as you imagined, I hear that this doesn’t work for you as an image, sort of like you immediate pick up on something that did not ring true for you. Two days ago I viewed the gold dome on a day with flat, flat light and it looked like it was illuminated from inside (it is not). I went back to the original image and, yes, I did lighten to foreground slightly and boosted the contrast in the clouds but essentially the light was either fairly bright diffuse or coming from the left quite directly. For me the bottom line is not so much how the sky and the light relate to each other, though I very much appreciate your thoughts, but the fact that this image has to be a single image as I’ve posted it, or probably not at all. Again, thanks for taking the time to share your expertise.
One of the big giveaways in reference to the lighting is in this section how the top of the treeline is darker than everything beneath it. Naturally, the reverse would happen, as the higher trees would be brighter being closer to the light source.
@Eric_Bennett I don’t mean to argue or to be a jerk but the light was coming from the SW, the left side of this image, and was blocked in places by clouds. You can see that the area above the dark tops of the conifers is lighter and the mountains are darker and the city itself was in a brighter part of the lighting.
You’re not being a jerk at all. Since you solicited feedback, I would need to see the RAW then in order to give applicable advice. I would like to help you but I don’t see how I will be able to at this point just based off of this JPEG that looks strange to me. Feel free to email it to bennettfilm@gmail.com and we can continue over there.
