Richard

You’ve got a project! I love it if I can find a project. Yours is to capture the cottage. Work it, move round it, try different lenses, times of day … a pretty good way of, sadly, saying goodbye.

That is certainly better to my mind @ms-fowler.

My first thought was a question ‘Why do you want it punchier?’.

I’m not going to add anything new, just to say that I would try cropping away a third of the sky above the top of the lighthouse, and I think the light vignette might work too.

Yep! Meant to delete it, but couldn’t see how.

I’m borrowing from David Duchemin, and my own efforts over the last few months, but I don’t think there is any balance within the frame. I feel there is certainly something better to be had from this situation and the interest is all in the right two-thirds of the frame. I think that I would have pushed, by framing tighter, or turning the camera…[Read more]

Sorry to be blunt, but no balance or real point of focus within the frame. Move a long way right and get the Shard within the tree/bush and use that as a frame. or crop much tighter. I think you can lose probably as much as half of the bottom greenery. That’s how it strikes me.

No comments? How strange. Maybe it is perfect?

My gut (I wasn’t there, don’t know what was possible) says move quite a lot of steps left, get more separation from the deer and the tree trunk. At risk of blowing out the bodies of the animals, half a stop extra exposure. However, I can imagine the movement might help to get some light on their…[Read more]

What fantastically brilliant comments you’ve garnered … especially from Michael. His line about beginning at the heart and progressing to the mind is just so true.

If your emotional reaction to this was what you’ve said in the title, I think you’d need to ask if you have actually captured the sunset and the ramp. I think waiting about…[Read more]

No comments? I’m not surprised, because it is a very interesting shot. I can only offer a couple of small detailed observations. I think it must have been possible to have taken two or three steps left and had the tower stand seperately. Make sense? Either that, or take a step or two right and have it sticking more obviously out of the top of the…[Read more]

Nice enought shot, but as you’ve titled it ‘Family Portrait’, I think you’ve almost answered your own question. This is not, to my mind a family portrait. Sorry to be blunt, but it is a photo of some people, who you might be able identify if you know them. For most of us it is a shot of some people by a river. I think you could get much closer…[Read more]

Spectacular sky … BUT … for me skies without any reference point, usually a bit of land, make me almost queasy.

Very interesting. The pont about the dog would, to me, be about what story you’re trying to tell. Dog in the frame, you want him obvious and active and that tells one story. Another, perfectly valid story, is ‘isolated country lane, in winter, without a living soul, not even a dog in sight’. Both work for me!

Calibration – I like Martin Bailey’s tip of turning down the brightness much, much lower than most people have their monitors usually set to. As such, I think of calibration as colour (I am very weak in that respect) but I think the monitor being set too bright is part of it, isn’t it?

Composition seeing this small, I thought ‘nothing wrong…[Read more]

I like all the comments you’ve received. I think the reason you’ve invited comments is because you know that there was something better there, something better to be taken. As others have said, get lower, or get higher. But given the photograph we have in front of us, I would crop it. I would crop as tight as I could at the top to remove the sky…[Read more]

No comments? The reason why is probably one of the stronger shots which have been posted with not such obvious flaws. We’re not supposed to say positives, but it is a very nice shot, but I do think, as I think you probably do too, that it can be improved. Maybe get lower, maybe push the tree a little bit higher and a tiny bit more to the vertical…[Read more]

This is very interesting. I’ve looked at a few of the photos which people have posted, and it seems to me that they are posted for the very good reason that people know they’ve taken a good shot, but they also know that there was something better to be extracted from the situation.

I do not mean it in a pejorative sense when I say this is a…[Read more]