Critics and Comments welcome

[gpzt]

This is my first attempt at getting comments on one of my pics.

Best regards,
Guy Poizat

[Donald]

Guy

I like how the shoreline is reflected in the line made by the edge of the clouds. You have captured very beautiful colour in the sky.

I wonder how it would look if there was some more detail brought into the land in the foreground and it was not so dark, and perhaps a lightening of the water at the right hand side of the picture.

An alternative approach is to ask - Do we need to see the land in the foreground and so much water. If you were to crop it to a 2:1 ration, keeping the existing top and sides and cropping it at the bottom, our attention might be even more directed towards the sky and it would position the horizon much lower in the image.

[gpzt]

Donald,
I submitted this view of Leucate because I wanted to keep the foreground which, obviously, is too dark and featureless. The enclosed picture is a "false" HDR obtained from the original RAW and processed with " Luminance" ( both Mantiuk 0.6 and Drago were used as tone mapping operators): the foreground is a little better but the sky is less dramatic. I did this as an exercice on HDR which I use very seldom, I must admit, because it's a bit too "artificial" to my taste. According to my experience, Gimp's PictureBlend and Picturenaut have the more "natural" look among the free softwares. Best regards, Guy