C&C Please?

[Nolan]

I was aiming for the frozen over river to guide the eye down the dark valley and to portray stillness or at rest if you know what i mean. This photo is unedited and I'd like to know what to do with it if anything. One thing i am kinda certain about is cropping out the left hand sides first inch or so to get rid of the distracting branches. Tell me what you think and leave some C&C.

Thanks and happy holidays!



Camera: Nikon D90
Exposure: 0.005 sec (1/200)
Aperture: f/5.6
Focal Length: 24 mm
Focal Length: 23.8 mm
ISO Speed:

 

[bcshort]

Well..
The sky is overcast, which in the middle of winter isnt particularly unusual, but it does have an effect of flattening colours throughout the photo and making the sky uninteresting,

I do like whats going on there with the river - the appears to be an S curve in the river.

I think theres definitely the makings of a good photo here. it just needs a bit of a colour bump (which can probably only be done on a brighter day), or you go the other way and convert it to a monochrome and play with the contrast

 

[Bunda4th]

Very cool picture. I am still new to photography but I am going to school to become a 3d environment artist (so I will take what I learn about outdoor stuff).

As you said the branches on the left side is distracting and it does draw your eye away but the composition of the picture is very nice. I would do some editing to the background tree because it does all blend into each other just making a blob of color.

My professor always say step back a bit and look at it and if you can't really tell the difference or distinguish the different trees then it is just noise or a solid color which can ruin a composition.

 

[Nolan]

I kept what you guys had in mind and I:
-Increased the contrast and definition
-Cropped out the branches on the left

I think it looks ok, but i wont being doing much with it. This was more of a learning experience. Thanks for the help and if anyone has more input I'm very interested.

(this is the edited version)

 

[o hey tyler]

The horizon also appears to lean to the right. Something you can also fix in post.

 

[fokker]

You should probably resize that photo, its a bit on the large side.

As for the pic itself, I would probably crop a bit off the top and bottom, there is a lot of rather blank space that doesn't add much to the photo there, plus it is square-ish anyway so you can probably bring it back to a more 'landscape' aspect ratio.