At the Lake's Edge

[Ziggy]

[escape]

hi Jim. As a starting point I would level the horizon a tad by bring up the right side and adding some contrast. I cropped off aprox 25 % off the bottom and right side. To me it resulted in a more ballanced picture with the different elemnts more porportional to one another. Just my personal view. I m sure you will get othere sugestons and viewpoints, Daniel

[escape]

Croped leveled and contrast increased.

[Manfred M]

hi Jim. As a starting point I would level the horizon a tad by bring up the right side

If you look carefully, we can see a physical horizon in the image and when I drop a horizontal guideline on the image, Jim appears to have nailed this aspect of the image. Your edit ends up with a horizon line that is not horizontal and needs to be rotated clockwise a bit.

I tend to agree with a bit of a crop, but perhaps not quite as extreme as yours. The image needs some sharpening as well, but I would probably handle different parts of the image differently. Background trees need a fair bit, the foreground grasses a lot less and the water and sky none at all.

[vaez]

very nice color

[escape]

Thank you Manfred for your comments on my versIon. Also my apologies to Jim for my poor observation on the horizon.

[Manfred M]

Thank you Manfred for your comments on my versIon. Also my apologies to Jim for my poor observation on the horizon.

Getting the horizon right can be a real challenge. I'm a tripod shooter when it comes to landscape work and I always check my camera to ensure it is set up level (I have one or more bubble levels I use) and sometimes the image does not look level, even though I know it was.

When there is a definite horizon (like in this image), there is an easy check, but if there isn't optical effects can fool us, so sometimes we are guessing at what looks right.

[William W]

Jim,

I think that the red/brown/yellow can have more guts and I quite like those tones which Daniel’s edit has brought out.

My main comment is that I think that the image you made was not “the shot”.

What I mean is - “The Shot” was positioning the camera forward and to the left so that the “Lake” in “The Shot” would be the area of water behind that brown bush in the top left of your original. If you look at that body of water it has a fantastic reflection of the Green Trees and it seems not any clutter in the foreground.

Obviously you might not have been able to get to that position, I don’t know.

***

. . . my apologies to Jim for my poor observation on the horizon.

I think that you confused the Horizon with the Tree Line.

I had made an interrogation of the original image before your conversation with Manfred, so I may as well post this now for your interest. You can see the Horizon is just under the top pink grid line, yet the Tree Line is skew to the grid - it is an easy mistake to make.



WW

[Shadowman]

Nice effort, I kind of like the flower in the right hand corner.

[escape]

William: I did see a bit of the horizon on the right side. I thought it was a thin streak of clouds. Go figure. lol
Regards, Daniel

[Ziggy]

Thanks all for the constructive criticism on the image. You can take an image but when you view the image later there is about 100 ways you can edit it. Makes my head spin sometimes.

Jim

[billtils]

I think that Bill's suggested framing of the shot is the best.