A lovely scenery
Frankly, I think this would be worth redoing on another day. Fall colors can be rich in drab lighting, but large expanses of water under a gray sky make for dull images, in my opinion. It leaves you will large expanses of gray--in this case, the majority of the frame-- that lack not only color, but also the tonal contrasts, lines, and textures that make gray-scale images interesting.
The whole reason for the image was to show the old bridge piers. It breaks up the vast area of water and shows a bit of the local history. I am standing on the third bridge that was built over the river that replaced the earlier one whose piers we can see. I understand that there was an even earlier bridge as well.
Punching up colours is easy; but given the overcast day, I actually desaturated the red and yellow channel a touch. A heavy overcast day delivers subtle colours without having to fight the heavy shadows on a sunny day. Cloudy days are somewhat the norm in the middle to later parts of fall in these parts.
Cropping to a different format is something I have done as well I do most of my panos using either a 2:1 or 3:1 ratio (this happens to be 2:1).
Is this last one the version before desaturation? I like it better. It's both more interesting and livelier.
I prefer the inclusion of the piers; they make it a more interesting composition, and the aspect ratio is more appealing.
I agree. However, it does create the problem of gray skies reflected in gray water.A heavy overcast day delivers subtle colours without having to fight the heavy shadows on a sunny day.
Manfred. Your history of the bridge pp changed your photo from a Fall River scene to a documentary photo. This altered how I view the photo. Very interesting.
Most of my landscape work (traditional, urban, seascape) tends to be either documentary or interpretive documentary work.
Pure documentary photography means that only traditional tools are used in post-processing; cropping, straightening, dodging, burning. In interpretive documentary, the image is pushed a bit harder; things might be cloned out or healed, etc, i.e. the image is processed with more aggressively.
This image is definitely more of a pure documentary image.