Imperial garden

[Daniel Salazar]

Hi all, critics are welcome.

[Dave Humphries]

Hi Daniel,

You clearly have an eye for the desired composition here and I can see what you're trying to achieve, but I'm not sure it has quite come off.
The following is offered as constructive advice for "next time" of the same view.

Try these ideas (I accept some may not 'work' for reasons you know of that I don't);
a) Include the whole, or most of the foreground urn, possibly with a vertical orientation?
b) A slightly higher viewpoint so the white BG statues aren't growing out of the handles of the urn, however, I notice there's another urn behind and such a viewpoint may have given that undue prominence, so this could be the best option as it is
c) If possible wait until there's no one in shot, or some people, but in a better place compositionally (or clone out in PP)
d) Take earlier in the day, the body of the urn will benefit from more frontal sunlight to bring out the intricate patterns on it
e) The sky has blown, there's no easy way to deal with that other than a grad ND filter, or replace it in PP, or a shoot on a "clear blue sky" day when it won't blow so easily

PP wise, I think you need to look at the sharpening process, it looks like you've used a large amount, a reasonably large radius and quite a big threshold, my guess (if USM) is >150%, >2 pixels and threshold of >10, but that's purely guesswork (and me trying to be too clever for my own good ). This has resulted in large white and black edge overshoots, as seen on; the top left handle, bottom right 'spike' below handle, some of the flowers, trees and urn detail.
For comparison, my final USM sharpening these days is usually something like 50 - 70%, 0.7 - 1.1 px and threshold between 2 & 6. I don't claim these are 'right' and much depends on picture content and final export size, but they're just to give you an idea. Since I'm guessing you don't really want to sharpen the trees (and spoil the bokeh), there are two ways I use; either mask off the background and sharpen only the foreground, or super blur (with a brush) the areas I suspect will get sharpened (i.e. trees) so their pixel radius is beyond what the sharpener will act upon - but that's probably a bad habit I am imparting there.

In pure composition terms, rather than a record shot of the place; the two big trees on left unbalance the image, I'd consider cloning them out, or if you have all the far left hand one complete (pre cropping), "clone transplant" it to the right to balance things up.

I'm sorry, that's quite a long list and I don't want to knock your confidence, just give some helpful advice as requested. Hopefully there's a lot to absorb there, if anything is unclear, just ask. It much easier for someone else to spot problems in one's own photo's, that's why I post here quite a lot, sometimes what I get back is what I expect, but often it's something I hadn't even thought of, the great thing is, it's always helpful. As I hope thi is.

You have managed to get a decent exposure for everything (except the sky) and colour balance looks natural, it's not noisy and it is level.

Regards,

[Geoff F]

For me, the background isn't adding anything to the image; it is just a distraction. Try a substantial crop to just leave the urn and flowers.

Then if you can clone out the second urn in the background and possibly what remains of the tree trunk, I think you may have a useable photo. Not a prize winner, you will have to follow Dave's advice on composition for that, but I think you will find a big difference with a crop.

[Daniel Salazar]

thanks to both, I think that cropping and just leaving the urn will be better, of course if I would have take the picture in a portrait orentation would have been better.

About sharpening, I used a Pre-Sharpening plug-in from Nik Software and at the end a Sharpening tool, for waht you Dave meant, it seems that I used a lot, then I should reduce it (using Aperture and not Photoshop).