This week’s photograph was made by J.J. Raia at Troy Meadows, Green Acres, New Jersey. By having his image chosen for this critique J.J. will receive a free 16×20 matted print from Aspen Creek Photo. If you’d like your images considered for future critiques you can upload them to the Flickr group I created for this purpose.

Before I get to the critique, I’d like to once again thank all of you who have submitted photographs for this series. There are many outstanding images in the collection, and I wish I could write about all of them!

For these critiques I usually pick photographs that are good, but could be improved in some way. Discussing those potential changes often provides valuable lessons, or good points for discussion. But I chose this image not for its imperfections—it has only very minor ones—but just because I like it. Sometimes it can be helpful to figure out why a good photograph works.

Before we go further, take a moment to look at this image and define some of the elements that make it work in your mind. Or, if you think something doesn’t work, see if you can figure out why.

To me, there are several key ingredients that make this photograph successful. First, the purple flowers, gold grasses, and subtle green hues create a pleasing overall color palette. Next, the low-angle light, raking across the meadow from behind and to the right, highlights the textures and patterns of the meadow. And then there’s that fog. The combination of color, light, and weather create a sunny, optimistic mood. It’s morning in America! Or at least in New Jersey.

Of course it’s no secret that great color, light, and weather can produce wonderful landscape photographs. But if you’re lucky enough to find those elements, you still have to frame them well. This composition is simple and clean; we see meadow and tree, and not much else. The tree provides a nice focal point, something for the eyes to latch onto before exploring the colors and textures. The layers of gold and purple, along with the band of the fog, add repetition (our brains love repeating patterns), and a certain visual coherence that helps hold everything together.

J.J told me that he deliberately cut off the top of the tree to avoid including bright, distracting patches of sky above. I agree with this choice. Including the sky would have drawn attention away from more interesting things below. And I don’t miss the top of the tree; we see enough of it to get a sense of its shape, and for it to serve its purpose as a focal point.

It can be tricky to cut off parts of important objects like this. If you do, make sure it looks deliberate. If you trim just the tip of a tree, or a person’s feet, or the corner of a building, it looks accidental—like you weren’t paying attention when you composed the picture (which you probably weren’t!). If you’re going to chop something, chop enough to make it look intentional.

A couple more notes about the composition; J.J. used a telephoto lens—210mm on medium-format film (Velvia 50 with a Mamiya 645). The long lens helped to narrow the field of view and frame only the most essential elements, and also compressed the space, creating the layered patterns in the meadow, and emphasizing the juxtaposition between the flowers and tree.

Also, J.J. told me that he tilted the camera to make the layers of grass and flowers slant diagonally across the frame. I would never have guessed; the tree looks straight, and it appears as if the meadow just slopes slightly from left to right. This is a small thing, but the diagonal lines help give the photograph more energy.

The photograph is technically well executed. The exposure looks perfect. Everything appears to be in focus, which can be difficult to do with a long lens raking across a field like this; the grasses at the bottom of the frame are much closer to the camera than the trees in the distance. J.J. said that he used a small aperture, f/22, and focused carefully using the depth-of-field scale on his lens.

This was captured on film, so the image was obviously scanned (with an Epson 2450 scanner). JJ then took the scan into Photoshop and made some minor adjustments. The overall contrast looks good.Viewed larger, I can see some dust spots in the mist—an easy, if tedious, thing to fix in Photoshop or Lightroom. The only other problem I see is that the color balance looks a bit too magenta. While that magenta tint might help boost the color of the flowers, it makes the trees look somewhat purple. In this next version I took the image into Lightroom and pushed the Tint slider to left (-23) to remove the color cast, then restored the saturation and hue of the flowers with the HSL panel (Magenta Hue -27; Magenta Saturation +17). The same thing could be done in Photoshop by using a Color Balance or Curves adjustment layer to correct the overall magenta cast, then adding a Hue/Saturation adjustment layer to tweak the color of the flowers.

There’s one more story about this photograph that you might find interesting. J.J. told me that he spotted this field of flowers while driving his daughter to camp one year. He thought the sun would rise at a good angle to sidelight the scene, so he came back a day or two later and made a vertical composition. He returned again the following year, found more flowers and more mist, and made this horizontal composition.

This illustrates how important anticipation and planning are to landscape photography. It’s rare to stumble upon a great subject when the light and weather are perfect. You need imagination to visualize how a scene might look with different light, and knowledge of sun movements and weather patterns to figure out when to come back. Of course some luck helps, but so does persistence. J.J. made a very nice photograph one year, came back again a year later and made, I think, an even better one.

So back to my original question: What are the elements that make this work in your mind? (Did I miss anything?) Or is there something you think doesn’t work about this photograph? Please let me know in the comments!

Thanks J.J. for sharing your image! Be sure to check out more of his outstanding work on Flickr.

If you like these critiques, share them with a friend! Email this article, or click on one of the buttons below to post it on Facebook or Twitter.

As part of being chosen for this week’s critique J.J. will receive a free 16×20 matted print courtesy of the folks at Aspen Creek Photo. If you’d like your images considered for future critiques, just upload them to the Flickr group I created for this purpose. If you’re not a Flickr member yet, joining is free and easy. You’ll have to read and accept the rules for the group before adding images, and please, no more than five photos per person per week. I’ll be posting the next critique in two weeks. Thanks for participating!

“Misty Morning” by Richard Valenti 

This week’s photograph was made by Richard Valenti at Lake Wildwood in Northern California. By having his image chosen for this critique Richard will receive a free 16×20 matted print from Aspen Creek Photo. If you’d like your images considered for future critiques you can upload them to theFlickr group I created for this purpose.

The best landscape photographs have a strong mood, and this image certainly has that. The mist, calm water, and symmetrical reflections create a beautiful, quiet, peaceful feeling. I can almost feel the morning chill.

Richard said that he was drinking his morning cup of coffee at his house along this lake when he noticed the mist. Since the sun was about to crest the ridge he didn’t have time to get his DSLR, so he grabbed his point-and-shoot (Canon PowerShot SX200IS) and ran down to the dock to compose this photograph. As he put it, “no full frame DSLR, no tripod, not shot in RAW; just a point and shoot set to automatic ‘program’ mode! I did ‘see and pre-visualize’ what I wanted the final image to be and carefully composed this image. I was only able to get two shots off before the sun broke through the tree line and totally changed the mood of the scene before me.”

Timing is everything in landscape photography. It’s better to capture a great moment like this with a point-and-shoot than not capture it at all.

Overall the composition is pretty clean and simple. I like the shapes created by the distant ridge and it’s reflection. There are lots of interesting details, like the two layers of trees on the far hill separated by fog, and the ripples in the water. The horizon is above the center, emphasizing the foreground water more than the sky, which I think was a good choice here, as the subtle textures in the water are more interesting than the smooth sky.

One thing I could quibble with is the patch of dark trees along the left edge. Sometimes a dark area adds needed contrast to an otherwise flat scene, but in this case I think it throws the image off balance; without any other dark areas in the frame the left side of the photograph feels heavily weighted compared with everything else. And although usually our attention is drawn to light areas, since this photograph is predominantly light our eyes get pulled toward that dark mass on the left and away from more interesting areas spots. I think this image has enough contrast and mood without that left side, but what could be done about it?

One solution might have been moving the camera position to the right, but since Richard was standing at the end of a dock that probably wasn’t possible. Perhaps he could have pointed the camera more to the right, but I don’t know what was over there—maybe something distracting. As we see it here, just cropping the left side makes this image feel off balance. But cropping both sides and creating a vertical composition does seem to work—it’s simpler, and emphasizes the most interesting things in the frame: the water, central trees, and mist. However, it’s more abstract, with less sense of place. This is a tough call for me; I think I prefer the cropped version, but I’d have to live with it for awhile. 

What do you think of the dark area along the left edge? Do you like the vertical crop, or prefer the original version? As always, I look forward to hearing your thoughts.

Despite the camera, the image quality seems pretty good, although there’s a strange color shift in the sky—purple on the left, cyan on the right—and the same colors are reflected in the water. This could probably be corrected in Photoshop with either a Hue/Saturation or Selective Color Adjustment Layer, possibly in conjunction with a layer mask.

Viewed larger some noise is also apparent among the trees along the far shore. Smaller sensors are more prone to noise, and it’s likely that the original JPEG was oversharpened in the camera, further emphasizing the noise. On most cameras the standard sharpening setting is too high, and it’s almost impossible to fix this later, while it’s easy to add more sharpening in software if necessary, so I always recommend setting the sharpening to its lowest setting if your camera allows it (many point-and-shoots don’t), . These in-camera sharpening settings only affect JPEGs, so if you only shoot in Raw don’t worry about it, but if you ever use JPEG mode it might be a good idea to figure out how to adjust the sharpness and turn it down.

While I have some reservations about the dark area along the left side of this photograph, I love the misty mood, and I’m glad Richard captured it, even with a point-and-shoot camera.

Thanks Richard for sharing your image! You can see more his work on Flickr.

If you like these critiques, share them with a friend! Email this article, or click on one of the buttons below to post it on Facebook or Twitter.

As part of being chosen for this week’s critique Richard will receive a free 16×20 matted print courtesy of the folks at Aspen Creek Photo. If you’d like your images considered for future critiques, just upload them to the Flickr group I created for this purpose. If you’re not a Flickr member yet, joining is free and easy. You’ll have to read and accept the rules for the group before adding images, and please, no more than five photos per person per week. I’ll be posting the next critique in two weeks. Thanks for participating!

“Kiva” by Derrick Kelly 

This week’s photograph was made by Derrick Kelly at Kiva Beach in South Lake Tahoe, California. By having his image chosen for this critique Derrick will receive a free 16×20 matted print from Aspen Creek Photo. If you’d like your images considered for future critiques you can upload them to theFlickr group I created for this purpose.

If you’ve been reading these critiques you know that I’m a fan of clean, simple compositions. This photograph epitomizes that. The four stumps stand out clearly against the smooth water, creating a serene, zen-like composition.

The image seems nicely balanced, and I like the way the stumps form a subtle curve through the foreground. The only thing about the composition I can nitpick is the visual merger between the two stumps closest to the camera; it would be great to see clean separation and balanced spacing between all the stumps.

Gaining that separation would have required either raising the camera, moving forward, or stepping to the right and pointing the camera more to the left. I don’t know if any of those options was feasible: the tripod might have been as high as it could go, stepping forward would probably have required wading, and moving to the right and pointing left could have introduced unwanted distractions in the background. But I point this out to make you more aware of such mergers in your own compositions; if you notice problems like this in the field then you have a chance to fix them by changing the camera position.

Derrick seemed to have a clear vision of how he wanted this photograph to look before he pressed the shutter. When I first viewed this image I thought it was captured at dusk, but it was actually made in midday light. Derrick put on a four-stop neutral-density filter, allowing him to use a 15-second exposure. This blurred and smoothed the water, giving the photograph a dusky, long-exposure look.

Derrick also knew from the beginning that he would convert this to black and white. He told me, “I like black and white because I feel it allows me to be more expressive in the image, with less ambiguity about my artistic intent, than does color photography.” Just for comparison, here’s the color version. To me the black-and-white image is indeed more expressive, and makes a stronger statement, than the color one. In color we see what stumps in water look like. In black and white we get that feeling of space and simplicity.

Color version 

I’ve talked about this in a previous critique, but it’s worth mentioning again how black and white can simplify a photograph. Sometimes color can just be a distraction; here, for example, the rocks underneath the water stand out more in the color image, pulling our eyes away from the stumps.

Derrick said that he processed the single Raw file twice in Lightroom, darkening one version to bring out detail in the sky, lightening the other to provide the feeling he wanted in the foreground. He then converted both to black and white and merged them together in Photoshop.

As with many things in the digital darkroom, there were probably several different techniques that could have created a similar look. But the particular tools don’t matter. What does matter is having a clear idea of what you want to convey in the photograph. If you can do that, then you can make the right decisions along the way to convey that vision, from the choice of composition, exposure, shutter speed, depth of field, and filters, to the steps of post-processing.

In his books The Camera, The Negative, and The Print, Ansel Adams stressed the importance of visualization. He said, “The term visualization refers to the entire emotional-mental process of creating a photograph, and as such, it is one of the most important concepts in photography. It includes the ability to anticipate a finished image before making the exposure, so that the procedures employed will contribute to achieving the desired result.”

I think Derrick did a great job of visualization here. He didn’t want a literal representation of reality. He wanted something more expressive, and took the necessary steps to create that, starting with the 15-second exposure to smooth the water, and finishing with some skillful digital-darkroom work.

What do you think of this photograph? Do you like the black-and-white version better? Does the visual merger of the two stumps bother you? As always, I look forward to hearing your comments.

Thanks Derrick for sharing your image! You can see more his work on Flickr.

If you like these critiques, share them with a friend! Email this article, or click on one of the buttons below to post it on Facebook or Twitter.

As part of being chosen for this week’s critique Derrick will receive a free 16×20 matted print courtesy of the folks at Aspen Creek Photo. If you’d like your images considered for future critiques, just upload them to the Flickr group I created for this purpose. If you’re not a Flickr member yet, joining is free and easy. You’ll have to read and accept the rules for the group before adding images, and please, no more than five photos per person per week. I’ll be posting the next critique in two weeks. Thanks for participating!