Nice shot of a modern day dinosaur! Great detail all over, but especially around his head and his diabolical eye. As to the suggested crop, it works fine but the framing as presented is fine too . The stick in the foreground is in roughly the same shape as the critter so it works as an element.
Sunset shots are fun but challenging. Though the colors are great in the first one, the blown areas and posterization in the first one is a distraction to me. The sunlit path across the water is pretty wonderful though. A severely underexposed shot to layer with the one that lost detail can sometimes work to rescue such images. Otherwise you might could do a severe pano crop leaving only very thin margins of sky and black foreground, and relieve some of the lost detail. Unless, of course, you like it that way.
The second is more pleasing with its gentle transitions and glorious yellows and oranges. I wish for a bit more black foreground at the bottom, and I find the sky a bit more cyan than is believable even at sunset. But it is a nice peaceful scene, and I really like the use of the silhouetted figures to draw us into the scene. They are just perfect.
What a beautiful bird! Exotics such as this would only be found in a zoo or a pet shop here, never in the wild unless it escaped from a cage. Would it hold up to raising the shadows a bit in those darkest areas? If a crop (which my bird shots usually are), maybe not. Anyways, a lovely bird I wish I could spot in a broken tree.
Excellent image. A beautiful "electric" sky that looks like an explosion of energy and fire, and of all things, a monstrosity of an industrial electrical outfit set before it. The delicate upward-pointing geometrical lacework of the towers receding into the fire in the sky makes for both art and story. Well spotted and taken.
Fat Joe wants to be noticed. A jolt to the eyeballs. The colour speaks/shouts for itself. The selected angle adds extra punch. It makes clear the urban/beachside location with the pole that morphs from one thing to another while the snake spans them both. The inclusion, top right is small but we get the message.
Actually, I find the photo funny. Despite all the biker tatts promotion, the garden is neatly kept and the palm fronds are carefully cleaned up and binned.
The photo suggests Fat Joe's is a market for elderly Harley riders.
Minnie and Mike,
Thanks! Your interpretations have given me more understanding of this enigmatic mural than I've ever had. And I drive by the thing all the time! Never shopped in Fat Joe's, though.
Thank you Chris, I love fog and will roll out of bed before dawn when I suspect there may be some.
There are two deer, actually, a mom and a fawn. The mist obscures the baby deer a bit more. Glad you found interest in it. Here is a technical explanation for the phenomenon I captured here, which is common in parts of the US during autumn when temperatures are warm during the day and cool at night. www.lakemagazine.life/nature_of_the_lake/smoke-on-the-water/article_4ba3de60-604b-11ed-b698-9b3f1c63bab7.html After sunrise, the fog begins to clump up and rise, then is usually gone within a couple of hours at most.
Thanks Mike. I agree that the subject is the lake transitioning. The deer are too tiny to be subjects, they are simply notes in the larger song. Which I know is not traditional nature photography.
Dan, thanks for pointing out the slight magenta cast. I do think your correction goes too a bit far as the greens were not nearly that green any more, the lake fog wasn't that white and some other colors seem adversely affected. I am pleased with a slight correction I made to the magenta cast based on your input.
To Alan and XPatUSA - thanks for joining in the discussion about color. It helped me clarify my own thinking.
I didn’t go through the exif data to see how he took the shots.
In any case it's not difficult to get a natural looking sky in the final image while retaining the specular highlights especially if shooting raw as described earlier.
I would need the raw file to set the white balance and final colours more accurately, not an 8 bit jpeg that has already been convertered from a raw file.
The point I was making is that the colour cast can be removed fairly easily.
I have posted several times in previous threads that the edits I do here using other people's 8 bit jpegs are not intended to be final images but simply examples supporting a point or suggestion I make in that post.
The edited version looks much better on my screen.
That is irrelevant because most people don't do their own home printing but their monitors can obviously still be set up very differently according to if/how they are calibrated and then profiled.