While traversing Loveland Pass in my truck in very slow moving traffic, this landscape caught my eye. I could now see at first the subtle snowboard tracks, but back home on the computer, with a crop, they became evident.
Type of Critique Requested
Aesthetic: Feedback on the overall visual appeal of the image, including its color, lighting, cropping, and composition.
Conceptual: Feedback on the message and story conveyed by the image.
Emotional: Feedback on the emotional impact and artistic value of the image.
Technical: Feedback on the technical aspects of the image, such as exposure, color, focus and reproduction of colors and details, post-processing, and print quality.
Specific Feedback and Self-Critique
A very impromptu shot, a quick exposure and composition. The original before editing and cropping includied a lot of elements, overhead clouds and shadows, dark forest trees, and a wide vista. I decided to cull it down to make the subtle snowboad tracks the subject of the image. Included below is the full RAW image.
Technical Details
1/250 sec f/11 ISO 64 Edited in LR / PS 24-120 f/4 @ 62mm
Gorgeous alpine landscape! This is fabulous. I love that crisp, clean and vibrant snow, mountain tops. Everything else is like adding icing to a cake! The partly cloudy sky is wonderful, the splattering of pines on the slopes and even the deeper forest. All balanced beautifully.
And thanks for including the RAW file - seriously, that’s an unprocessed RAW file? looks pretty dang good right out of the box! And glad you included because in your cropped original, I noticed the forest areas at the bottom and right, it looks like the contrast is much diferent, and trees lighter than all the other small groupings of trees on the slopes. BTW - the snowboard tracks, another nice touch to the bigger picture. Getting back to the forest, the RAW file looks like the contrast and luminosity is consistent across the frame, so not sure what happened in the vertical crop.
Comp wise, the vertical is wonderful and well balanced. And of course the snowboard tracks show a little better. But I must say, I think your original horizontal is a winner too! (minus cropping out the snow plow debris…)
I can’t get over how good that snow looks. Very nicely done!
Gary, both of these images are very nice and different. The first one gives me more information about the white rolling hills and spotted trees. The second one is more about the beautiful hills in the background. The sky is very nice in both. I like how it dips down below the hills. I won’t say anything about the raw file since it’s not processed, but like Lon said, it looks darn good. The trees in the first image look a little washed out. Maybe you were doing this to have the eye travel more toward the hills. Great job on these photos.
Thank you for your observations, Lon. I started using +2 on my exposure compensation which has helped on shoooting snow and using a white background in LR/Ps to compare the “whiteness” of the snow.
Thank you for your thoughts. Perhaps I I could have gotten to the erdge of the other side of the road or bracketed the shot, it may have reduced the fuzziness of the trees, certainly they may have been brighter. Thanks for pointing that out, I’ll probably get another opportunity or two before the winter ends. but no more drives there on the weekends. Thankfully I am retired.
