Scenes of Vermont Forums

Here is another one from the week up in the Michigan U.P. in October, 2012, with James Moore, who is a very accomplished landscape photographer. His critique and suggestions made me look inward a bit and "stretch" the way I normally "see" and photograph. One afternoon, we concentrated on what he calls "sectional" images. It gets away from the "grand landscape" where we are looking for foreground, middle and background elements and balance of composition. I find this very challenging - trying to pick out "the image" from "the forest."

I will post a couple here (in separate threads).

Andy, is your saturation slider stuck on max? ; ) I really like the contrast in colors but I think the saturation is overdone. Carol's is just right.

The thing I always wonder about these shots is whether you should show the tree trunks meeting the ground. I don't have answer for that but I think I'd like your shot better if you cropped it so that the trunks weren't visible at all.

With Carol's shot, I wonder if I would like it better without any sky. I think I would because the red tree would grab more attention than it already does.

Al: Saturation? What saturation? Seriously, this looks better on my large, calibrated monitor. Probably for posting here, I should just automatically tone it down. I didn't move the saturation slider. That is close to what the raw image looks like with some "local contrast" and straight contrast adjustments in ACR. I did do some localized saturation and believe it or not, DE-saturation in Viveza with localized control points.

I agree that Carol's is not as saturated, but it also looks just a bit "flat" in tonality on my monitor (I am in the office and it is admittedly not calibrated and seems to have too much contrast and be generally too dark for images - though it works fine for word processing).

I debated for a while whether to include the trunks or not, composed with and without, tried to decide how much if any; and finally decided I liked including the section of trunks. They are just over 10% of the entire image, and I felt that they give it a depth and an "anchor" point that the eye needed to keep it from just being a photograph about a "wash" of colored leaves. On the right there is an evergreen and there were some other colors too, so it was also partly about selecting the right "mix."

Carol, didn't you see me? I was the guy standing right behind you asking you to move out of my frame . While I can see a number of differences in our images, and probably even the "vision" we were going for, I am astounded at how similar they were. For just a moment, when I scrolled, I thought you were showing me something I could do with my image and it was a copy! Guess we were thinking and searching alike that day!