Landscape Photo Competition 2013 No 5 : Judges Critiques : Page

Beautiful. This would make a strong entry to the wildlife competition.

This is a beautiful view and you have captured the misty atmosphere pretty well. A closer crop might have been more powerful, perhaps with a longer focal length you could have got right into the essentials, the trees and mist, making a contrasted image of shapes and lines where the sky and field are unnecessary? There is something magical lacking for this to get through but you are well on your way.

Beautiful capture. Just didn't quite make it through.

A difficult subject to approach because it has been done so often before, but you have managed this quite beautifully. Wonderful play with lines and shapes make an awesome composition with perfect exposure and subtle darkroom technique. The black and white accentuates the wind lines and creates an eye stopping image. Well done!

Ooh là là. I have no doubt that it took a lot of imagination and know how to obtain this amazing end of the world atmosphere with your computer from a photograph. What we want to see in this photography competition is what you can do with your camera. Post processing is fine, and essential even if you are shooting in RAW format, but it should enhance the detail you have managed to capture in the digital file, not replace it.

This is a fantastic setting and we have had photos from this Antelope Canyon in every competition since the start. They very rarely make it through because they are all very similar to the thousands of other views of this same place, not very original. There must be another way to approach these over photographed locations, something new and exciting… Here you have managed to get the same view as usual though I’d guess with your phone, and going by the lack of sharpness you might even have been talking to someone on it as you snapped. ☺

The white tree is amazing and makes a great anchor point within this lovely landscape. You have placed it very bravely at the edge of your composition where it really sets off the lake. But the foreground is sadly cut too high. Those bushes towards the right are nice and would have added to the composition, as would a few more tufts of grass to the left. The ground detail is much more interesting than all of that empty blue sky, try a lower angle and compose with more attention to the foreground shapes. The view is great but what is in front of your feet sets the atmosphere and brings detail and interest.

This is refreshing, different, interesting, nicely taken, though the horizon doesn’t look very straight. It seems you have tried to draw our attention to the rusty barbed wire around the fence post by using a short depth of field. This is very clever and shows us some of the passion you have obviously put into this. I feel that your focus goes a little too far back into the plants beyond the post making them a distraction and thus undoing the overall bokeh effect. Perhaps with an even wider aperture and a closer focus point you would have got the perfect photograph.

Well spotted and composed. This is a superb submission, it is refreshing, original and nicely taken. The red car is perfectly placed and really boosts the colour palette. Almost made it through this round but as you can see, the competition is tough. More please.

You have managed to get the clouds moving with a very long exposure, this can bring a fantastic 3D effect to a photo giving the unmoving subject matter so much more presence. Daytime long exposures are usually created with a dark filter to slow down the light. These are called neutral density filters because they are supposed to be neutral and should have no effect on the colour balance. However the very dark filters do tend to alter the white balance and it can be tricky to correct. They also create very high contrast images. It looks like you have encountered those problems here.