Dovestones Reflections. Mist but no light!

Wow thanks everyone. Very kind of you.
Steve @SFTPhotography - the honest answer is that I wasn't wide enough (mm wise) from the view point the shot was taken from unfortunately to give it more room. I think i was at 17mm on a crop sensor and needed to be wider i'd have to agree which is unfortunate.

Edit - checked the exif i was at 28mm - i will have another go at the edit try and give it more room top and bottom....
 
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Yes #2 is lovely, has great atmosphere, really works beautifully. The clouds and light did you a favour, nicely shot
 
The second image has disturbing tonalities and textural contrast - the darker, sharper tones in the shape of a rocket intruding from left centre are pictorially strange, especially set against the vague diffusion of the trees in the middle. I suspect that you've done too much tonal processing, trying to make something of an image that you weren't totally happy with?

The first image looks more natural in this regard and every other way, really. Where the second is compositionally lop-sided, the first has balance. If it has a problem, it's that the eye has no resting point, but is pulled equally from the centre to left and right.

Which leads me to a related issue about symmetrical reflections in general but especially (and curiously) those in the vertical dimension - they tend to seem like an odd form of seeing double - a confusion of mind. But no way am I against reflections, it's those vertically symmetrical ones that bother me most.

With photographs, which exist within a frame, we naturally expect a direction of view, and the most convincing view generally is into the frame (depth). It's an illusion, of course, but it works. Symmetrical reflections are more likely to make an image seem more two-dimensional, I feel.

Another context is that perhaps there are two schools of photography, one of which is documentary (factual) and the other being one that requires an emotional response. There's a spectrum of hybrids between those two poles. Most of my own images slot in at various places along that spectrum, and I think that it's instructive to consider one's images in that regard. What is it, exactly, that we're trying to do? It's a journey towards clarity. It might take a lifetime. You might have a job, kids and a mortgage that get in the way. But that's irrelevant to the argument in question - I'm talking about photography.
 
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