Critique Style Requested: Standard
The photographer is looking for generalized feedback about the aesthetic and technical qualities of their image.
At dawn, there was the strangest cloud, along with reflections and the boat. Does the composition work?
Reaction to the image.
Fuji X-T2, 14mm 2.8 lens, 8 sec. Lightroom edits, Topaz DeNoise AI
This is quite eye-catching and engaging. I like the low light and the serenity as well as the unknown quality of the boat. Why is it there? Where is the paddler? Did she fall in? Is it just endlessly floating around? Certainly gives my imagination some room to roam.
That said, I think the canoe competes too much with the cloud and I don’t know which you want me to look at. I know which I’d rather look at so the inclusion of the cloud is not helping me. Also I find that the cloud has too much texture and clarity for this long of an exposure. Not sure why you needed such a long one, but the slight movement of the boat helps with telling the story of its possible unmoored state.
To fix this I’d crop or change positions on the shoreline to eliminate basically most of the left side. What a great find. Almost makes me want to leave my kayak in odd places for this kind of thing.
What a cool image! It must have been very clear to see stars so close to sunrise. (It’s amazing that the camera can see stars that we can’t.) You made a good choice of exposure to bring out the stars, and limiting it to 8 seconds gave good stars without movement blur. I love the boat with its glowing light and reflection,and the calm water with the reflected trees.
The cloud does feel a bit distracting, even though its color matches the boat well. I wonder if you can clean up the noise in its upper part and reduce the detail in it? I’d hate to crop it as I love the shoreline coming to an end near the left edge.
Hi Meredith 
I really like this image!
I have always enjoyed viewing high clouds that are lit up from below as they are in this scene. The sun is on or maybe slightly below the horizon and lighting the underside of the clouds, that direction of light often creates some very interesting looking clouds, they rarely look that interesting when they’re lit from above after the sun has fully risen.
I’m guessing that the length of the exposure helped to expose the stars so well?
As for the boat being anchored so far out from the shoreline reminds me of a time when myself and my family were tent camping at a remote part of a lake near the NC coast, I anchored my boat at the shore but apparently the anchor didn’t dig in to the bottom of the lake as well as I thought, when we woke up the next morning I noticed that my boat was a few hundred feet out in the lake, the coastal winds during the night moved my boat. Fortunately we had a couple of inner tubes tied to a tree near our tent so I used one of those to float out to my boat and bring it back to the shore
BTW, I see the anchor rope at the front of the yellow boat in this image and it’s pointed almost straight down so, maybe the wind carried it away from the shore in this case as well?
For me, I find myself just pleasantly exploring the whole scene, I’m not finding any particular points of distraction or competition for my attention, it’s just a pleasant scene in my view.
Personally, I find it to have been well composed and well exposed!
Nicely done IMHO.
That cloud is rather strange and I’m amazed it lit up like that. It really works though because it balances out the yellow boat on the right side of the image nicely. To top it off, you have the classic (and much loved by me) yellow/blue colour combo here. My only tiny nit here is that I wish the reflections of the top of the trees wasn’t cut off at the bottom. Still a great image though!
What a great story, made me smile.
This cove is very shallow. The yellow boat is actually tied to a mooring anchor in deeper water. The owner of a sailboat leaves it there for his return, he moors his sailboat and then uses the small boat to get into shore.
Yes, I did the longer exposure to capture the stars. I am quite taken by stars still showing in a morning sky and even reflecting in the water.
I was hoping that the boat adequately balanced the cloud. Thanks for your comments.
Meredith
Ah… thanks for that. I’ve seen people do that before but I forgot it.
I have a bunch of unique boating experiences that all ended well, some were funny and some were heart warming like an instance where two teenage swimmers were being carried out to sea by the tide, I noticed them on the ocean side of the inlet and brought them back to their dock in the intracoastal waterway, their mom was crying hysterically as we got closer to the dock but it was clearly a cry of joy that her sons were safe.
I just happened to be in the right place at the right time.
Thank you for the wonderful response!
Meredith, What a serene and captivating morning you have here. The stars, light, and reflections create an impactful image. Terrific image, I agree with @Kris_Smith about the distraction from the left cloud and have removed it in my version which still needs some cleaning up in the sky. I simply used the new remove tool in Photoshop 2024. You might try Topaz Photo Ai if you have it that might fix some of the blur. You were aptly rewarded for getting up early with this image.
I feel the cloud balances the image out but still find it too distracting. I also can’t figure out the star trailing with the 14mm lens and the short exposure. Maybe it’s just lens distortion. I would probably crop off most of the left side. JMHO of course.
Thanks. I’ll give your suggestions a try. Very helpful to hear what others “see” and think about.
The photo was taken at pre-sunrise so the longer shutter speed was needed to collect more light in the foreground and also capture the stars. But the longer shutter allowed the boat to move, and blur, from the tide.
The cove is very shallow so sailboats moor out further from shore. The boat was tied to that mooring, awaiting the sailboat’s return and the owner’s use to get into shore. The cloud didn’t move, the sky was still.
Happy kayaking,
Meredith
It’s already been said but I too find the cloud to be distracting. It’s a cool element, but that yellow boat is the star and in @Michael_Lowe or @Larry_Greenbaum crops, my eye goes straight to it and then slowly wanders around to enjoy the rest of the image. Such a great find!
Thank you for the edits. Certainly the image is cleaner in this version. My use of a longer shutter resulted in the boat and the star reflections in the water blurring from the tide movement but collected some more light in this predawn shot.
–Meredith
Thanks, Tom, for the comments. Good point about the bottom reflections.
–Meredith
I think @Larry_Greenbaum did an amazing job removing the cloud! It would be tedious but quite possible to repair the stars there. Then the pre-sunrise color could be enhanced even more to balance the boat, which I think is the star of the show.
@Michael_Lowe, the oddly shaped stars are due to lens distortion. As 14mm lenses go, this one is excellent. There must be software somewhere that will make stars more round.
Thanks, Diane, for the idea of enhancing the sunrise color, for balance.
