Steps

[JC46]

Comments & Critiques welcome

 

[ceeboy14]

Might I inquire the color of the WC sign?

 

[JC46]

Red

 

[The_Traveler]

To me, it's not obvious what the center of interest is.
There is no ground, the woman at the top is very small and the large front of the building is pretty bland.

 

[deeky]

Based on my tendencies, ther are some great textures to make more abstract - lamp, building, steps, rail. There are just too many of them with too broad of a view to work as abstract, and as others have said, not a great point of focus for a general landscape shot. Definitely spend more time down there working it.

 

[Rick50]

^^^ What the last 2 said...

 

[JC46]

I should have noted this when I submitted the image, but I was looking for a good exposure, rather than any artful meaning - My bad, but I'll remember to add caveats in the future.

The vast majority of my work lately has been ending up as black and white images. With that in mind I've been putting more time into getting a good initial exposure, rather than trying to manipulate the image later in Lightroom. For the submitted picture I selected aperture priority, set the exposure for the mid-tones, shot with recommended shutter speed, then another @ + .3 f/stop, and one more @ + .7 f/stop. In Lightroom I adjusted the image to the point that the details in the shadowed areas began to emerge. The sky was overcast so I left the highlights as shot.

 

[The_Traveler]

My suggestion is that, if you just want only to practice getting good exposures in your post-processing, photograph a grey scale and reproduce that.
The 'correct' exposure for any random scene is really based on the actual distribution of tones in the frame and the intent of the maker.
If your monitor is calibrated and your images look the way you want them to, then anyone else's opinion is just that.