Photofeedback #7: Beauty of Nature picture taken by @businessway!

Well how about that, it's Saturday already!
I hope you guys are enjoying your weekend so far. Mine is quite nice: we've got a visitor staying over and my throat is starting to feel better and better.

I've also been looking for photographers on Steemit today and I've found some very interesting posts and people. It's really nice to talk to all these people about photography and their posts, but also about #photofeedback and what they think of the concept.

It's so great to hear that people like what I'm doing and especially that they are getting value out of it. That's the main purpose of this Steemit account: providing value to my readers while learning something myself along the way.
But I also like to hear things that could be done better in your opinions. I'd really like to make this blog as valuable as possible, while still keeping it joyful to read for everyone.
So if there is something you think could be done better, please don't hesitate to leave me a comment so that I can adjust my posts accordingly.

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While checking Steemit for photography posts, I found a user called @businessway. He posted a picture on his feed and I left him a comment. He appreciated my reply and asked me to review one of his pictures. I checked the #photofeedback tag and there it was: the second picture submitted by using #photofeedback!

@businessway just started using Steemit and he posts a mixture of business tricks and photography. You should go check his feed and please don't forget to follow or upvote his content!

The picture he submitted is taken in Bangladesh (his homeland), in the region of Chittagong. I looked it up on Google and the nature is truly beautiful there. It's like a rainforest with some very nice lakes and hills. He shot the following picture on Chandranath Hill (I don't know the camera or settings used):

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Some first impressions:

• Nice colors! I like the yellow and orange tints on the leaves created by the sunlight. This, in combination with the green of the trees and the blue of the sky, makes this a very nice picture to look at from a colors perspective.

• I like how the subject (the mountain) is framed between the trees. Framing is a technique used in photography to create more depth in a picture. By having a frame in the foreground and the subject enclosed by it, your eyes are automatically guided from foreground to subject, which is pleasing.

• Those electricity cables are such a pity.. They are really distracting, especially in a nature picture, where man-made objects don't belong (except if you want to portray the damage that is being done by humans to the environment or something like that).
  However, the cables do form a part of the frame around the mountain. So there's definitely a point for leaving them in the picture.

• It looks like @businessway already edited this picture quite a bit. I think he added some contrast, quite some saturation and a vignette to attract more attention to the center of the image. This means that he already knows something about post processing, which I can only applaud. For a big part of the photography community nowadays, post processing is an essential part of their work.

• I don't really like the crop on the left side. There is almost no space to the left of the tree, which makes it not so pleasing to look at.

• The temperature of the picture seems a bit too cold (blue). This can be seen in the mountain and the trees around it. I think this isn't the way @businessway saw it with his naked eye, it probably is because his camera adjusted the white balance automatically based on the foreground.

• In my opinion, the mountain is blending in with the sky a little too much. This is probably because of the blue tint it has, but I think it's also because of some haze in the sky. This happens a lot in pictures where the background is far away. There is a lot of air in between the camera and the background, so the light has to travel through more moist, pollution, etcetera. This will show as haze in your pictures.

• Maybe it would have been nice if some more context was given, by adding some more foreground. The trees in the bottom of the image are cut off the image, so you can't see where the photographer is standing. I guess he was standing on a hill too, in which case it wasn't possible to add more foreground without tilting the camera way too far down.

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After looking at this picture for a while and importing it into Lightroom, I began to edit it to give it a slight upgrade. Notice that I did some very minor editing:

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What did I do and why?

• I adjusted the overall temperature of the image a tiny bit, and the temperature of the mountain quite a lot. It looks a bit more natural to me now, instead of the blue wash it had before. The added yellow tint also makes the scene look even more sunlit.

• A little added contrast made the trees and mountain stand out some more.

• I did not adjust the saturation or vibrance of the colors. It seemed like @businessway had already done that, and I was very pleased with the colors in the original image. I also left out a vignette, because it was already present too.

• I made the blacks in the picture a little bit more black, this is also known as 'crushing the blacks'. This is especially useful in black and white photography, because it separates the two tones more, but it is also nice to use in pictures with dark parts in them (like silhouettes). In this image, there's the frame that is made out of trees and leaves. The leaves in the bottom part are a bit blacker now, which accentuates the mountain a little bit more.

• To reduce the haziness in the background, I moved the dehaze slider up a little bit. This made the mountain more visible and detailed.

• I really like the sunlight shining all over this scene. To emphasize this light and the orange tones it brings, I added yellow/orange split toning in the shadows. There is a slight orange glow over the picture now, which makes it look a bit more like the sun is setting. Lovely.

• I didn't mess with the cables. I edited this in Lightroom and it's quite hard to remove both of the cables by just using spot removal. This is way easier in Photoshop.
  And after looking at this picture for longer and longer, I start to get less irritated by their presence. They form a part of the frame and they contribute to the imaginary diagonal line that can be seen from the top left towards the middle right, following the trees in the foreground.

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What would I do differently composition-wise?

• I think I would try to find another frame a few metres to the left. This would have excluded the cables from the image and may have added a new tree or branch as a fill in for the top right side of the image.

• I would try to add a little more foreground and see what happens. There is a possibility that the power of the framing would disappear, but it's always worth a try.

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Conclusion:
@businessway did a very good job shooting this picture! I like the colors, the subject and the foreground which creates a frame for that subject. I'm guided through the picture by this frame, but also by the transition of colors and differences in brightness and darkness.

There are a few things that are distracting or could have been done better: the crop is a bit tight on the left side and the electricity cables are a piece of human creation in the middle of nature. They do end up to be a part of the compositional style of this image, so it isn't horrible!
The white balance was a bit off in my opinion, but this was recoverable in post processing.

The longer I looked at this picture, the more I began to like it. All credits go to @businessway for traveling to this place and shooting this beautiful scene!

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I want to thank you for reading my newest #photofeedback and I would love to hear what you think of this picture and the remarks I left.

Special thanks go to @businessway for taking this picture and sharing it with me for review. I hope you learned something more about photography along the way!

Love
#photofeedback