Critique Style Requested: Standard
The photographer is looking for generalized feedback about the aesthetic and technical qualities of their image.
Photographing//composing wildflower scenes is challenging for me. Between movement and the chaos of the flowers it was a a learning experience.
300mm f/16 1/20 sec iso 2000.
Mario, this is beautiful. I love how my eye is moved into the picture, from the sunny foreground to the forest’s depths. I want to explore what can be found there. The texture of the bark and the vertical lines add interest. It would not be as enjoyable if you had focused on just the foreground. Freezing movement has been a big challenge for me, so I understand what you say. It gets even more difficult with a telephoto lens. The slow shutter will almost certainly not be fast enough. The foreground needs to be sharp, which is not the case here. Did you set the ISO, or was it on automatic? Putting it on automatic will allow you to increase the shutter speed, hoping to freeze the movement. Post-processing has gotten very good at removing noise. I use Topaz DeNoise. You also might try opening up your f-stop, which can give you a faster shutter speed. I know the theory but am not very good at getting sharp images. Thanks for sharing this beautiful photograph.
Thank you for your comments @Barbara_Djordjevic . I did do focus stacking but apprently did not get low enough in the frame to catch all the lavender flowers. I did use topaz denoise as well. I had been using an iso of 2000 alot that day and frankly probably was not looking at my settings as much as the histo. Lots to leaarn.
This is such a fun shot, Mario. I like the colors and the boldness in both those and the tree trunks. I did see a few things that I think would help so played in Photoshop for a bit. First was to neutralize the blue in the dark bits of tree bark. Probably overzealous vibrance or saturation combined with a too cool wb unless the bark was actually blue. My edit didn’t remove all of it, but I bet the raw file is relatively blue-free. Second was the too bright flowers in comparison to the deep shade under the trees; smoothing that light fall off makes things easier on the eyes IMO. I also cloned out the tree in the far left since it wasn’t contributing to the pattern. All subjective I know, but I like the results and the potential in this captivating scene.
Agree with Barbara on some solutions for a sharper image - opening up a stop or two could help with this lens as could getting closer with a wider lens. Wider lenses, as you probably already know, have greater depth of field and so you don’t have to close down as much to achieve similar results. They don’t have the compression that a long lens has and that did work in this case to artificially make it seem as if the fg and the bg were closer together.
Thanks @Kris_Smith for you rework and comments. I wonder if this is a good alternative with out of focus FG. I also cloned out the tree and changed WB for blue hint in trees Kris.
