Florida Landscape (Circle Bar B Reserve)...C&C appreciated

[jprzybyla]

This is one of my favorite natural places not too far from home. This was taken early morning, looking across the marsh. The Bald Cypress have shed their needles. There is a Bald Eagle perched on the very top of the Bald Cypress in the center. I did not notice it when I took the image but later discovered it upon closer examination. So much activity early in the morning.

[Donald]

Joe

If that location is close to your home and you can visit it throughout the year, then you have a super venue to keep going back to.

I've never been in Florida and I suspect the light is very different than it is here, especially at this time of year. But the colour of the marsh grass just doesn't seem right to me and i wondered if you had done any significant colour/saturation adjustments in post-processing?

The other thing I think you need to look out for is where you place your horizon lines in the frame. In this one that main line across the frame is right across the centre. This is one where I think you maybe needed to be thinking more about teh rule-of-thirds as you were composing it in the viewfinder. If you were to crop quite a bit off the bottom and make it into a 2:1 aspect ratio, you'd lose a lot of the grass at the bottom, that's not really all needed, in my view, and you would lower that dominant horizontal line down to about the bottom 'third'.

[jprzybyla]

Thank you for your suggestions Donald. Posted below is the 2:1 crop. I put the far tree line at approximately the lower 1/3 line, cropping the foreground marsh as you suggested. I shot the original in raw with the camera set to neutral, so I did boost the saturation and vibrance. What attracted my attention to take the photograph was the soft early morning light falling on the Bald Cypress trees, making the scene appear bathed in a soft light of early morning. In Photoshop I did use a soft light filter with the opacity set to 50%. Thanks again for your suggestions, I am learning digital photography trying to be a sponge sucking up as much as I can learn, as quickly as I can.

[Donald]

I'd be interested to hear what others think, but, immediately, I think that makes for a much more powerful image.

[Geoff F]

I'd be interested to hear what others think, but, immediately, I think that makes for a much more powerful image.

Yes a lot better.

For me, any foreground needs to be either interesting, leading the eye deeper into the scene, or relatively small and fairly sharp to act as something of a 'border'.

A large area of bland and confused texture tends to stop me right there and prevent my eyes from searching further into the scene.

When I first got my 40D, Joe, I set the options to Neutral Mode and couldn't understand why I was getting excessively saturated results. Eventually, I read the manual and altered it to Faithful; although I mostly shoot Raw so that gives me a second chance to have a think when I see the larger image.

I'm not sure what filter you used although I sometimes set a duplicate copy/adjustment layer to Soft Light in order to give a slight boost to contrast/saturation. The advantage of using layers is that I am able to edit a mask to give a more selective enhancement.

[jprzybyla]

Thanks Geoff. I did use a layer for the soft light but I did not use a mask. What area might you have masked in that scene?

[Geoff F]

Well for me, there is a bit too much 'clash' between the bright blue sky and the bright green foreground. It's almost like a 'sandwich' with the central 'filling' being overpowered.

I'm not quite sure which way to go but think I would initially try to slightly reduce the impact of that sky. But I mean slightly. If there were a few fluffy clouds there I would leave it as it is.