Hodgson Water Mill - Missouri

Image Critiques Everything Else Critiques
1

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Hodgson Water Mill in southern Missouri. Hurricane Delta made me make a last minute detour from my original targets in western Kentucky for the first couple days of my first ‘COVID era’ trip, and had to scramble to find spots that weren’t going to be crazy busy but had a known photographic quality. Ended up hanging out at this mill for quite a while waiting for the clouds to build from the south (outer edge of Delta) to give me the lighting conditions I needed for a nearly mid-day shoot.

What technical feedback would you like if any?

The stream is a blend of a couple different exposures of varying exposure lengths, was going for a smooth but not ‘milky’ overall flow with some texture. Any spots that jump out as obviously shorter/longer than the overall? All other technical feedback welcome as well.

What artistic feedback would you like if any?

Color theory and color balance has been something I’ve really been trying to work on and expand my experience and knowledge around. There’s really no ‘color grading’ to speak of added to this shot, but it’s something I’ve been trying to experiment more with so any ideas along those lines is welcome.

Any pertinent technical details:

I think I started with 5 base RAW files for this, between 1.6 sec and 1/30th to get both the water flow about how I like it and all the small foliage around the water not to be blowing around. Mostly overcast skies gave some shape to the light without it being overly harsh as it had been when I first arrived on location.

2

Gorgeously composed scene with very pleasing colors and tonalities! I don’t see any indication of compositing parts of the water, and find the amount of blur very pleasing. One thing that struck me right away was the appearance of significant pincushion distortion. It’s probably just the way various elements are arranged, but I wonder about trying some barrel distortion. I don’t know how much you would change things, but the upended stump on the left is something I would clone out. I’d hate to crop it because the tree above it is so pleasant hanging over the railing and shading it to give a nice vignette to the edge. The same for the tree behind the roof. If I didn’t want to alter the truth by removing it, I would clone some leaves over it in a few places to soften the vertical form.

3

Thanks for the suggestion on the distortion. I didn’t really notice it until you mentioned it, but I agree it’s probably an optical illusion - but one that can at least easily be reduced in ACR/LR easily enough. Played with trying to clone out the fallen tree stump, but there’s just not a lot of donor information around it to work with - so decided to cool it down a little and darken it a touch to reduce it’s visual impact instead. Thank you!