Drying Pool

Lovely scene, Youssef, with excellent light. I find those bright reflections in the midground, toward the top of the image a tad bit distracting.

What Mahesh said. I do like the patterns and I'm glad you cropped some of the empty sky.

Nice image and good technicals. I'd prefer a slight pan to the right to include all of the cut-off curve of the salt or high water line and the bright reflections are distracting as Mahesh said.

It's a nice photo with an interesting composition. I wish the gradient of the grad wasn't so obvious and you could see more detail in the dark areas. When I say the gradient is obvious I don't mean that one can see you used a filter. I just wish the exposure on the rocks was more even.

- Dan.

A nice shot. Perhaps you could lighten the middle ground somewhat.

Youssef,

Another strong image from this hard-to-shoot-well place!
I would prefer the rocks in the upper part of the image to be a bit brighter. Didn't notice the reflection issue myself, but agree with the comments after I read them.


Anders

Thanks for all the comments. You have pointed out everything I was having trouble with.

Mahesh, those reflections bothered me as well after I finished the image just before I posted it, but I was tired of working on it.

Alan, the cutoff water line / salt line is easily fixed because I scanned it while in the slide mount and it ended up touching the edge when I croped the image to square it up. I'll just have to scan it out side the slide mount.

E.J., your comment will the hardest to deal with, as that is what I spent most of the time doing, trying to open up the shadows in the rocks. The reason I think I was having so much trouble is that I have higlights in the foreground as well as a hot sky, so creating a mask from the image itself is very difficult. It was hard to mask out the sky to work the foreground without maksing off the salt, and the then the salt gets blown out.

Anyway, Iwill try to work on it some more. If I can get it better I will repost it. Thanks All.

The composition here works really well - worth the editing effort to try and rescue more shadow detail. This is a situation where I find doing mulitple exposures often works better than a grad.

The bright reflections grabbed me but I really like the composition here, certainly worth the effort you've put in.

Eric Fredine wrote:The composition here works really well - worth the editing effort to try and rescue more shadow detail. This is a situation where I find doing mulitple exposures often works better than a grad.

Yup, I agree completely.

Youssef, please repost if you get a chance to rework the image. It's an extremely intriguing shot and I'd love to see it after some more post-processing (it'll be worth the extra effort, I'm sure).

--Kerry

This thread is really informative; thanks! I like this photo for the composition and now even more, after reading the critiques, I can appreciate what you were going for to make this work as you would like.