Here is another abstract from my early November trip to Yosemite Valley. Straight reflection, cropped a bit from original. Colors exaggerated slightly for effect - after all it’s abstract right?
As always, your thoughts, critiques and suggestions always welcome!
This looks good, Lon and the colors do not look overdone to my eye. I like your crop idea but works as is too. It took a minute but I can see where you got the title. The crop fits the title more, too. No other suggestions here.
Lon, the colors definitely pop. The mix of gold, blue and green looks good. I am wondering how a bit of edge burning in the blue at the bottom would look. I like the top, because of the extra details. I find the featureless blues at the bottom somewhat less interesting, although you’d have a more balanced mix of colors using only the bottom 3/4th. The only ways to get better dof (shooting from higher up, or a using smaller apeture) don’t work very well on these small reflection scenes. In this case, you might have been able to get away with a higher f stop and still have enough speed to keep the motion blur under control…
Lon, you have really embraced the intimate abstracts this year, it’s nice to see the variety in your work. The colors are strong, but I do think you can “get away” with more in abstract pattern shots.
The strong color contrast and strong color saturation go hand in hand. I also see a second interesting image lurking in just the left half of the image as presented. I think that results in an even more abstract look
My only suggestion here relates to your comment about wishing for more sharpness. Whenever I shoot a surface of water from the shore using a telephoto focal length, I like to use a 3 or 4 image focus stack, shifting focus from front to back. The inherent narrow depth of field from telephoto lenses makes it almost impossible to get everything sharp in scenes like this. In this particular shot, a stack may or may not have worked well, it depends if the ripples were moving rapidly or not. I use Helicon Focus software for this, but for simple stacks like this would be, Photoshop has a focus stacking function that would work well. I prefer Helicon because it can stack raw files and output the stack as a DNG file, letting you still make raw adjustments to the stacked image. PS outputs a TIFF file.
I love the colors Lon. I thought maybe a panoramic crop right across the middle, but I don’t know, kind of with the title and all it would seem like a panoramic might engender that idea better.
It’s like liquid gold. Gold finger would have made a nice title. The yellow really dominates in this composition. Some suggestions may be attempts for more equal balance of other colors.
