Travel Photography Photo Critique

Hola Pablo, I think that the subject is not strong or interesting enough, not because of the elements themself, but because of the way you composed them into the frame. What do you wanted t transmit with the image? Contrast? geometric shapes in armony? freedom? mistery? color contrasts?, rithm?, lonelyness?, quietness?, etc, etc) If you can t find any clear answer to this question, it s because the composition was not clear enough, and there where you must work before shooting. We ll be back to this below.

Well... the image is quite confussing. I would, personally, have taken off the frame about 1/3 of the image at the right, and 1/3at the bottom. The major problemns here are: 1) the wood fence is too big in the image! And it s out of focus, with very little light modelling and textures, very desaturated colors, and almost no rithm in its placement into the frame. 2) After taking off 1/3 of the image in the right and bottom, the image starts to have certain ordewr and clearity, almost enough to get the spectator attention! But, bird is not in the most interesting position, specially the head. maybe if it would have opened its wings, you would have a thematic union between the ship and the bird, besides adding some movement action or tension to the image. 3) the clouds would have make a difference if you start using a circular polarizer filter. It s almost a "MUST" in landscape photography. It would have helped with the reflections in the wood too, making them more saturated. In conclusion: By cutting off the 1/3 of the image, the fence would have been interesting enough, with rithm, and a nice basement for the frame, but the sky (without polarizer) and the bird don t help much still... So, the best advice I can give you is that next time shoot many photos of the scene (the bird could move very quick!) and cut off all you can, until you can t cut anything else off.

The big fence out of focus is quite distracting and disturbing. Next time, try to look for a reason for such a big object to be in the composition. If you can t find it, cut it off! If you still want it to be there, be careful with focus. If the object is that big, it s maybe better to let it completelly out of focus (acting a s a frame, for the subject, for instance) or giving it a sharper focus using a bigger depth of field (bigger F number)

The speed seems to be correct. the f number not (regarding focus matter). The horizen is quite correct. The ship seems to be a bit burned, so be careful when you have white objects in a scene with darker enviroiment, and look the histogram allways and see if something is burned (that s the white object foir sure..)

Sun is quite well positioned, so you have a quite plain lighting but not too much. That s why, the contrast and objects separation must be achieved by the composition and filters like a polarizer, etc. If the fence would have been more brown or vivid, the contrast of colours would have been much better. (blue and brown, good combination!)

In these cases, with very close objects you must pay attention to depth of field. If you want more focus in the foreground and background, you have to use the closest aperture you can without affecting the rest (the ship moves slow, so maybe a speed of 1/60 or 1/100 would be probably enough. Sometimes it s preferable to add more noise increasing the ISO number, and get more depth of field.

Well Pablo, I think you have to move more before deciding to shoot the picture. And try to cut off the most of objects in the scene until you have the most important ones in order to give "order to the chaos".