I took this on a beautiful day last November on the shore of a nearby lake. I had just listened to a podcast about impressionistic photography and was out exploring the idea further. This scene, seemed ideal for exploring the interplay of light and texture.
Specific Feedback Requested
General comments plus, more specifically, is are the blank, gray spaces on the right hand side contributing or detracting from the overall composition.
Hi James
I love the display of color. Wow. It’s almost hard to believe that so many colors could exist in a scene . Also, I like that the colors are soft and subdued, yet their colorfulness is on full display if that makes sense. The colors are not blinding.
For me the blue-gray soft simple background on the right adds a sense of balance and peaceful color, to the brighter colorful activity on the left side of the frame. Also, the two dark tree trunks in front of that gray, kind of mirror and balance the two bright tree trunks on the left. (I guess I have a bias toward “balance” today!)
You must have been thrilled to come upon this scene.
James, I love the dreamy, fairy tale feeling of this image. Like Hansel and Gretel wandering through the forest. Did you apply some sort of filter like an Orton effect to it? It is so dreamlike.
I forgot to mention this was taken with the in-camera Soft Focus settings in my Fuji XT2. When shooting in Raw mode, using this setting will capture a Raw file and a JPG with the camera presets.
First off, I think the composition is nice here, so this scene has some potential. My main suggestions are about the way you processed the scene. The really heavy, muddy blacks aren’t helping here, since they are a bit too intense and harsh for such a soft and delicate scene. Also, the orton/blur effect you added here is way too obvious and takes my attention away from the subject matter and makes me focus on the editing instead. This is the kind of scene you want to be really light handed with, it doesn’t need much. Some of the trees feel overly saturated, and the background feels a bit purple so I think the magenta is too heavy here. The green pine tree is too saturated as well to the point where it looks unnatural.
I would go back a re edit this. Don’t push the blacks to0 hard, open up the shadows, don’t add global contrast, don’t increase saturation anywhere, possibly DESATURATE the greens, and then just get that white balance just right so every color is represented without a cast, and slowly create a little contrast by bringing up the whites to +40 or so and then lower the blacks accordingly.
