The photographer is looking for thoughtful feedback on the image as a whole, especially around the areas noted below.
Feedback Focus: Artistic + Technical
About This Image
It’s been raining steady here all day so I’m at my computer trying to catch up on a bit of my image processing. This image is from the Black Hills in South Dakota and it’s honestly a pretty simple, straightforward shot. No complexity here other than the strong(ish) contrast between the light and shadow.
Feedback Requested
I’d welcome thoughts on what would most strengthen this image, either artistically or technically.
Also I’m interested if you see anything funky going on with the sky. Often when I edit b7w images with featureless skies they tend to appear blotchy and now I’m not sure the sky is OK or if I’m seeing things (especially in the ULC).
Technical Details
Camera: Canon EOS RP
Lens: RF24-105mm F4-7.1 IS STM
Focal length: 105mm
Shutter speed: 1/125s
Aperture: f/11
ISO: 100
Tripod/handheld: handheld
Filters: none
Technique: point and shoot
Tom, it’s an impressive scene and I like the way you framed it and processed it. Nothing in the sky looks odd to me.
I think it might help to lighten the shadows at the bottom. I played with it and found that a mild brightening of most of the bottom with a more aggressive lightening of the bottom left brought out a lot of good detail.
Wow, these a very impressive formations! “Piercing” - great description. B&W also serves this scene perfectly.
The sky looks great, but of course very difficult to judge especially when we downsize all our images to post on the web. I see faint hints of banding, but again, hard to judge here.
The contrast and processing in general look great! The one takeaway or impression I got of these “piercing” formations is that they come across as ancient. What I mean is that they are not as ragged as say Patagonia or even the Sierra for that matter - tells me there has been many more eons of erosion, etc. Of course I’m also guessing more like sandstone than granite… so there’s that. But regardless, just seeing these formations gives me a sense of geologic history. If that makes sense?
A fine graphic image. With the distraction of color removed, it’s all about light and shadow. I like the contrast as is. Yes, I see banding and some splotchiness in the sky. That’s the first thing I look for in web compressed images with large amounts of “plain” sky.
A dramatic subject that works very well in black and white Tom. It takes just a moment to appreciate those distant trees, but they really add to the scene once the eye sees them.
I like @Don_Peters suggestion about the shadows (just a little bit though).
I don’t see much in the way of banding/blotchiness when I download and view at full-size in Photoshop, so if you are seeing it here it may be a compression issue.
Hi Tom,
Piercing is definitely an appropriate description for these striking sections of rock. I also think the contrast with the interplay of light and shadow helps reinforce that graphic mood. The trees are also a nice find in the scene and add a sense of scale. The B&W processing looks just fine to me and I do not see any banding in the sky as it looks smooth to me. My only suggestion would be to maybe lighten the shadows just a little, but not so much as to lose that wonderful contrast with the light. Very striking image!
Tom, the ruggedness of these peaks is striking. The high contrast adds nicely to that ruggedness. In my limited experience going to b&w, it at least used to seem that solid blues (like sky) showed more noise than other parts of the same image. One fix was to warm the white balance t0 5800 or a bit higher. I think I see some subtle banding in the sky, but as others have suggested, that’s probably compression in the jpg conversion.
