I don't normally post at this length, so apologies to anyone who dies part-way through ...
Questions:
1) Is the resulting image something you'd be happy to have captured/edited?
2) Would you have done something different, i.e., cropping or other editing?
3) Is there something that you might have tried differently while getting the shot?
Critique doesn't have to be limited to the above.
Thanks!
One of the questions I ask myself now when I take a photograph is ... "Why am I taking this photograph?" ... what does this scene - whether it's a landscape or any other scene in the world -
do?
What a photograph
does might be to convey a mood, or maybe it's a snapshot to remind me "I was here"; it might tell a story, though this is quite difficult without doing a series, and anyway seems to me the least important criterion for judging an image (unless in a particular instance it isn't of course
). Or maybe its one or more of hundreds of other things. Other people use the language of "intent" or "vision" when talking about this, but I like the practicality of "what does it do?"
You don't have any control over how the viewer will see and respond to your photo (you really don't - an horrific scene might be sexually arousing to some viewers, a babe-in-arms could provoke disgust and fear, or perhaps either will be uninterestedly noticed and then passed over).
Accordingly, I think it's important to make your photographs for you; if other people like them (perhaps even if they provoke a strong reaction of any sort) then maybe you've achieved part of what you wanted. On the other hand (there are several hands here of course), you may want to make photographs that please other people (in which case you have a job on your hands, as there's 7 billion of us to please)
Anyhoo ... When I looked at your original, I immediately wondered what it was you
wanted from it. You'd taken the trouble to stop at this place, frame a photograph and then after you'd looked at it, post it for public critique. That suggests to me you wanted something specific, but that you weren't quite satisfied with it (of course, I may be completely wrong and you might just be trolling, or bored and had nothing better to do, or whatever).
I sometimes take scenes like this; when I look at yours, I experience a suggestion of quiet lateness, a calm, the sense of something coming to an end. I also notice that the light is very flat - the sun has already set- and when I look at your Flickr 'stream, that you seem to favour (at least recently) photographs taken in late, flat light, and thus scenes without much contrast or shadow play.
I find that kind of light hard to manage successfully, but it seems to work best if I treat the scene Impressionistically. I'm not suggesting one tries slavishly to make one's photographs into bad Monets, but just holding in mind that I don't have to try and pack everything into a scene, and that detail and sharpness are grossly over-rated as criteria for good photography.
More directly, the original version doesn't work for me - it's simply feels too flat; my response to it is a bit "meh ..."'; your tweaked version is what begins to suggest something and is thus more compelling to my eye. I think this is because the foreground starts to have a bit of "life" in it. You could experiment with lifting it a bit more, but I wonder how soon that would jar or appear artificial (as we can see that the light is behind the trees and not illuminating the foreground), but again what matters is what you want the photograph to
do, and you may want it to jar, and you might not care whether anyone notices the way it's processed, so long as that's in the service of what you want it to do.
My most personal response is that the composition leaves my eye constantly pushing off to the right hand side (RHS as viewed I mean), and I feel a bit irritated that I can't see what was off to the right; the curve of the grass exacerbates this, so the left hand third of the picture becomes superfluous (cropping it doesn't seem to help, I still end up feeling irritated!); But then I didn't take the photograph, and my cognitive (and aesthetic) responses are mine alone ...