Well spotted, this a very good car close-up, shooting just this part of the car works very well. If I had to mention a very minor niggle, I'd have to say that there is a slight distraction at the top of the image which I would be inclined to crop off, but that's just me, maybe, and it really doesn't matter very much.

Lovely view and colours.

I'd be tempted to crop off the greenery at the bottom, because there isn't enough of it to serve any purpose, and it's so different from the other colours in the shot that it only distracts. Well, in my humble opinion, that is...

And it could also be interesting to see a version with the noise reduced.

There's a halo around the horns, but otherwise I like it!

I love the light, the dust and the movement of the horses in this. I think I'd be inclined myself to crop some of that rather large dark foreground off to make sure the darkness doesn't dominate the image, maybe make it a bit more letterbox format that way, but I suppose that's just a personal preference.

Great image, well done.

I like the composition and the feel.

But I think this might also work well if you crop off a lot of the white and use a panoramic format.

Lovely photo, very well lit and composed. Although there a few distractions, like whatever it is that's on the wall on the left - and to be completely honest, I think I would have been inclined to shoot this without jewellery, I also find it distracting me somewhat from the main subject of the picture.

But still a wonderful photo, I like it.

I quite like this - good composition, with emphasis clearly on the Brownie, yet with interesting lines in the rest of the image. Works well in mono. The only thing I would have liked to have seen, would be some more space beneath the hands, but that's all. Good effort!

Hadn't seen this one before, not even the colour version, and I really like it. The selective focus of the lensbaby works very well here. I like the idea of getting this very limited peek into someone's private life. It's very well composed and exposed, and just generally well executed. And you don't even have to have a shoe or feet fetish to feel that there's a hint of sensuality in it. Just a hint, though, making it subtle enough for me to like it a lot. There's really only one thing I don't like so much, and that's the patterned surface beneath the foot, but it looks like it was just there and you couldn't do anything about it.

Well done!

This is a great shot, showing the surfer in his surroundings, and even as a landscape shot it appeals to me a lot. There's only one thing I could mention that to me feels somewhat "wrong", and that's the fact that you're not showing much of what the surfer is looking at, instead you turned the lens more inland and captured the area behind him, instead of what's in his view. But that has to be a very minor niggle.

In my view, there is more right than wrong with this picture. I mostly like the composition (one minor niggle discussed below) with pretty good placement of the people. I love the light on the water. And the sky, although not spectacular, has plenty of interest and is quite beautiful in its own way. I even rather like that darker bit of sky at the very top.

The only thing I wasn't keen on, was the combination of having the horizon in the middle and the extra body of water in the foreground. Unless I'm shooting something that gives me reasons to make my image more or less symmetrical, I try to avoid having the horizon in the middle. Usually it works best to have it at 1/3 or 2/3. And that body of water in the foreground is slightly distracting to me.

The beauty of the situation is that you can fix both in one go: just crop a little off. In doing so, I also cropped off a bit from the right-hand side, moving the people over a little bit more to the right. Same principle - although you didn't have them slap bang in the middle, I thought it would be good to move them a little bit.

After that I did a few more minor tweaks, like upping contrast and mid tones, changing levels a bit, and upping colour saturation - see the modification.

The image didn't need much help, I quite liked it already, but hopefully this does give you some additional ideas as to what you could do with it.

I agree with you that this is indeed a different angle than the traditional view of this bridge, and in that respect this really does work. Also, seeing it up close like this has more impact on the viewer, imho.

I would have liked to have seen a little sky above the top of the bridge, though - the composition feels a bit claustrophobic now. I've also wondered if a slight rotation isn't called for. It's hard to see in images like this, but it just feels like it's sloping downwards on the left-hand side. Just slightly, but I thought I'd mention it anyway.

Oh, and I think I would be inclined to crop a bit off the left - I would like to remove that bit in the left bottom corner, which I find slightly distracting. And before cropping it, you could try to straighten the verticals of the buildings a bit with the Transform function in Photoshop - if that's the imaging program you use.

With regards to the exposure you haven't badly at all, for a first time with grad filters. It's the composition that I think you could have improved.

Although the stones in the clear water provide some interest in the foreground (which may have been improved even further, possibly - did you think to use a polariser as well?), it looks like you had more options to choose from - there's some old wood in the immediate foreground that has been used only half-heartedly. I would have liked to have seen more of it. It would have been good to have improved the compositional balance between foreground, sky and the rather vast expanse of water in the image. Do you think you could have gone back a little, included more wood (without text, which slightly spoils the image for me, I really don't think you have to worry about image theft that much, so why not leave it out) and more sky? Maybe with a slightly lower viewpoint?

Nice shop, and definitely with some photogenic aspects.

It looks like your camera exposed for the interior, and exposed it correctly, but since there was more light outside the exterior got overexposed. You could have underexposed to correct that problem, or used a different metering method, or tried to correct it in post-processing.

I see - multiple moods of the subject, I assume. Well, I think you succeeded. But if it's different moods of the same person, I would have been inclined to leave out the young man. I'm also not terribly keen on the top part of the picture, I suspect it would look better if you replaced or removed it.

If this was just about the fly, I would have preferred it if you had zoomed in more and left out more of the background, maybe even left out part of the flower - more like a macro photo, really. I also would have been inclined to move around a bit so that the less distracting part of the background was behind the subject, instead of the busy part which we see behind the flower with the fly now.

Also, I find the date stamp in the picture distracting. If your camera has a setting with which to turn that off, I would be inclined to do that. Otherwise I'd crop or clone it out.

Since you obviously can't re-shoot this, maybe you can do something with the existing photo.

I made a quick modification - bit of a rush job, so by no means ideal, but it should give you an idea what I mean. I cropped out unwanted background, surroundings and date stamp. I blurred the background and re-sharpened what was left. It was quite the crop, so I was left with a very small picture which I had to enlarge for upload, and it looks far from ideal, but with the original, bigger file you should be able to get better results.

Hi Angelo,

Welcome to ephotozine, and what an interesting first upload!

I really like that sky, but also the leaning building on the left and that beautiful fountain(?) on the right. For the most part I like your composition, although I would probably have been inclined myself to move in such a position that the fountain completely blocked the building on the right from view, while now it's peeping from behind the fountain, which makes the background in that part of the image not as "clean" as it might have been. It would probably have been nice to have had a bit more light on the fountain as well, but that's just a minor niggle.

Oh, by the way, you've chosen "Street photography" as the one and only category for this photo (you can choose up to three) - may I just point out that according to our own ephotozine glossary the aim of street photography 'is to capture everyday moments and people's interactions with each other and their environment'. So for this shot Architecture, General or Landscape/Travel would probably have been more appropriate choices. You can still choose other categories for this picture if you go to Edit.

Anyway, a promising first upload, I rather like it, and I would love to see more where this came from!

Hi Paulo, it is indeed a beautiful place, and a sunset always seems to enhance beautiful surroundings, doesn't it.

I agree with Somnath that you could have improved your composition. For some reason you seem to have wanted to include some land as foreground interest, although there isn't much to see there, but it looks like you exposed for the sky, not the land, making the foreground very dark. You could have solved this by using a grad filter, which would have held back light in the sky a bit and given the foreground more light. I solved this in the modified image by selecting part of the foreground and giving it a selective levels treatment in Photoshop. But you could have got this right in-camera with a grad filter. Or taken two shots, one exposed for the sky and one for the land, and combined them in imaging software.

About the land in the foreground - choosing to include it, and being at the height where you were when you shot this, you gave the image a big stretch of sea with nothing in it. Had there been something to see there, like a boat or something like that, it would have been fine, but now there is just a big area of empty water. And you've given the sky, which I presumed from your description was supposed to be your main subject, the smallest part of the image. You could have solved this by going down very low and pointing the lens a little more upwards. Going down very low would have meant that you could still have included some land, but it would have made that stretch of sea look a lot smaller, and you would have been able to make the sky a more prominent feature in the image.

Or, since the land you included isn't that exciting to look at anyway, you could have forgotten about the foreground and just shot sky and water, and since there is interest in the sky and none on the water, I would have suggested giving the sky 2/3 of your composition and the water 1/3.

Now, about this image, as I said I made a modified image in which I lightened the foreground, and I tried to make the sky and the light look better by playing with levels, contrast, colour saturation, highlights and shadows. I hope you like it!

Edit: It could probably have done with a little sharpening, but I forgot to include that in the mod.

I know exactly what you mean - both about having people in the shot, and about Snettisham being deserted. You got much nicer conditions than when I was there on my holiday in May, the sky was completely grey then.

Anyway, about your image - wonderful sky, and I'd say it was perfectly exposed, no problems there, and with good detail and light in the foreground as well, which helps to see all those nice ripples. I'm in two minds about Somnath's cloning suggestion - on the one hand it would unclutter the image, but on the other hand I think it's good to have more in the image than just that one boat. I think I'd probably be inclined to only clone out the one just above the boat in the foreground, and leave the rest in, because the others look like they balance out the composition.

Anyway, it's quite a pleasing image. Hope to see more where this came from! (Especially since you say you live close to this location, so your shots should bring back holiday memories for me...)

Edit:

Where are our manners? (Only just noticed that you joined today and that this is your first upload!) Welcome to the site, Graham! It's a great start of your portfolio on here. I hope you'll enjoy your membership of ephotozine.

Hi Dave, lovely dog, definitely worth a good portrait.

Pamela has already dealt with the composition, so that leaves just one other thing that I thought of when I looked at this photo - and, in fact, it has already been hinted at by Mary: It looks like you took this shot in full sunlight, and to be honest that's not ideal for this kind of photos, indeed not for many photos. You tend to get harsh highlights and contrast, and can even get burnt-out spots in your images. Not that yours is that bad, but you can tell that the sunlight hasn't exactly improved it either. Solution is to shoot on a cloudy day, which provides you with nice, even lighting without the harshness mentioned.

Hi Steve, welcome to the site! And what an atmospheric first upload!

Compositionally I think you generally did quite well here, with something to draw the eye in all the right places. Exposure seems okay as well. Image quality is not as high as it could have been - did you shoot this at high ISO, by any chance? There's a lot of noise. You could try removing it with software - there are plug-ins and stand-alone programs for this purpose, even freeware, so it doesn't have to cost you anything.

The only thing I noticed immediately, was that your horizon was slightly wonky, and the colours seemed a little flat for a sunset.

If you have a look at the modified picture I uploaded (beneath yours - click on it to enlarge...), I've tried to find some ways of improving it. I must admit that I skipped the noise removal option, I'll let you try that for yourself. I went straight to leveling the horizon, which made a slight crop necessary, and I cropped the top a little extra to get the horizon higher up in the frame. You don't always have to do this, but often a landscape image will look better if the horizon is sitting at either 1/3 or 2/3 of the frame, vertically speaking. I then proceeded to play a little with contrast, shadows, mid tones, colour saturation and hue, and the modification you see here is the result. The adjustments I made in this small version of your image only emphasised the low image quality, but since you have the original, you shouldn't have too many problems with that when you try some further tweaks yourself.

I hope you like it, and may it give you some ideas.

Enjoy the site!