First image in the woods, but it lacks something

[JohnRostron]

I had promised myself that, for 2015, I would regularly visit my local wood for a photo-diary. I managed on January 2nd, but I have not been since, having been laid low by various bugs. This picture is of the first foliage of Early Dog Violet, one of the first-flowering blooms of the year.

As a record of the new leaves against the woodland floor it is fine, but it seems to lack any impact photographically, and I cannot see how I could give it some. I thought it might be because it is essentially just two colours.

This was taken with my Canon PowerShot SX260 HS, f/3.5, 1/60, ISO 800. The original image was cropped and sharpened.

Any suggestions welcome.

John

[James G]

John, It is the kind of shot I take for myself and then puzzle over
I would try a couple of things...
1) increase the depth of the shadows without increasing the brightness of the image.
2) Crop in a bit further to a more specific point of interest
3) (I use Photoshop), and would probably try 100% vibrance layer with a second Hue and Saturation layer to lift the greens reds and yellows. (My 'trick' is to overdo the hue and saturation and then change the layer blend to luminosity. )

James

[JohnRostron]

John, It is the kind of shot I take for myself and then puzzle over
I would try a couple of things...
1) increase the depth of the shadows without increasing the brightness of the image.
2) Crop in a bit further to a more specific point of interest
3) (I use Photoshop), and would probably try 100% vibrance layer with a second Hue and Saturation layer to lift the greens reds and yellows. (My 'trick' is to overdo the hue and saturation and then change the layer blend to luminosity. )

Thanks James. I have made an attempt to follow your suggestions. I used Nik Viveza as well as Photoshop adjustment layers and produced this:


I have to say that it does look better.

John

[Manfred M]

Your second version is definitely an improvement, but the image still seems to lack focus.

I suspect it is that the idea of the green leaves amongst the dead brown ones would work, but there are simply too many of them to catch the viewer's interest. I suspect that a composition with a single burst of green, rather than multiple ones might work better for you.

[DanK]

I agree with James and Manfred, and I think the second is much better. However, I also agree with Manfred that it lacks a central focus. I spend a lot of time in the woods in the summer, and I have this experience often. Something looks interesting in real life, but reduced to a two-dimensional image, it lacks a central focus.

[James G]

John, glad it helped.

I'm often poking around local woods and seeing similar images. They always catch my eye in the field, but somehow don't quite meet expectations out of the camera.
I came to the conclusion it has to do with our innate ability to focus on what interests us at the time, and ignore surrounding detail by not observing it... if that makes sense. The camera of course observes in a quite egalitarian way.

[DanK]

They always catch my eye in the field, but somehow don't quite meet expectations out of the camera.
I came to the conclusion it has to do with our innate ability to focus on what interests us at the time, and ignore surrounding detail by not observing it...

I agree. That has been my conclusion as well. I find that when I hike with my wife, she will often point out very interesting scenes, and I reply that they will be boring when reduced to a photo. A great example of this is if you look at something like this:



Standing on the shore, everyone has the same reaction: a magnificent view. Take a photo, and what you get is a lot of uninteresting empty space in the vertical and very small mountains. In other words, boring. In our minds, we focus on the interesting part and largely ignore the rest. To get this, I had to use a 250mm lens on a crop sensor camera and then crop severely.

[Geoff F]

The edit is certainly better, John, but possibly needs a different crop, as previously mentioned? Sometimes I find the rotating an image like this through 90 degrees gives a totally different scene, and alternative crops become viable.

With this sort of scene, I usually take dozens of shots from slightly different angles then delete at least 90%. And too often, the only keeper is the one which I thought wasn't going to work.

But I find this is a difficult time of the year to look for inspiration.