Took this at the old fishing boat wreck at Corpach, near Fort William, crouched low by the bow. I liked it at the time but it never quite worked, and it took a critique to show me why.
- I exposed for the sky and lost the boat. The shadow side of the hull is just a dark shape. The fix is simple: meter (or tap to expose) on the hull, not the sky, and accept a slightly brighter sky. Then zoom right in and check you can see the wood grain.
- The horizon runs downhill to the right. Not by much, but enough that your eye slides out of the frame. Grid on, or rotate in the edit and crop the corners off.
- The foreground pebbles are a bit soft. They take up the bottom third, so they carry a lot of the texture. Focusing about a third of the way up from the bottom would have helped.
The one thing it said I got right was the low angle: "The low, close viewpoint makes the hull feel tall and imposing, which suits the subject well." So I'll take that.
Disclosure: the critique came from Artluni, a tool I built for exactly this kind of feedback, with each note pinned to the part of the photo it means. If anyone wants to try it there's a no-signup preview on the homepage and 3 free critiques with no card: https://artluni.com/?code=FOUNDING50&ref=lemmy-photography . If you end up liking it, FOUNDING50 gives half price for your first 6 months, then normal price, cancel any time. Happy to hear what you'd have done differently with this one, too.
Additionally there are composure issues
This particular photo would be improved much by cropping in closer to the subject.
Backing off from a subject to include foreground and sky only works well when the foreground and sky are both interesting and complement the subject.
In your photo, the foreground pebbly beach adds nothing; it just isnt interesting. The same applies to the sky. The white board laying on the beach distracts the viewer. As do the two chumps standing next to the boat, and the leaning crane on the left. The only interesting thing in this photo is the subject itself, which is composed to only occupy about 10% of the image. The vast majority of pixels in the photo are disposable.
That’s why this photo didn’t deliver the punch you might have thought it would: the photo’s technical flaws are not the problem. It’s the composition.
This is a good lesson in composure: the composition of a photo must never take precedence over the subject matter. You can’t “improve” a photo simply by widening the shot and putting the camera close to the ground. The subject matter at hand has to be accept and be evocative with that composition (as in the example I linked to above). This subject matter isn’t.
For this image on the day it was taken, a tighter crop and slight repositioning would make the boat more intriguing, spending a higher percentage of photo pixels on interesting subject . As in this photo. You can see here the sky and beach aren’t really that interesting, so the photographer did not compose them as first class citizens.
Taken on a different day with a different sky and different beach/water conditions, this composition might have worked slightly better. But probably not better enough.
Additionally,
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