Critique Long Lens Landscape

sirch

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The other Chris
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2, 4, 7, 8 and 10 work for me because they give my eye somewhere to settle and seem to have something to say.

To try to be helpful:
1) There's not enough interest in the subject tree to hold my attention compared to the large areas of bokeh.
3) As above, really. I can invent a message, but photographically it doesn't catch my eye.
5) Looks like a random snap of some walkers who stopped to photograph a cow.
9) The wall should be a strong diagonal, but the OOF stuff in front weakens it too much without adding interest of itself and focus is in front of the wall. I wonder if the shot would be much stronger with the berries in focus and the wall as a diagonal bar behind dividing the frame?
11) Looks like an attempt at mixing textures, but the image is too muted to make it really work for me.

Many, but not all images (1, 3, 7 and 10 are the exceptions) seem either slightly blurred, have missed focus and/or lack sufficient depth of field.

Really hope that's useful.
 
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Critique apart on your shots, I think long lenses for landscape have a valid place in our work. I'm a big fan of using my 70-200 in lots of circumstances.
 
@ancient_mariner - Thanks for taking the time Toni, I really appreciate it. I was in two minds about 5, it amused me the way they surrounded the cow and was very much part of the outing but doesn't really fit the theme. 9 was intended to be a bit of a counter point to 8, berries in focus, berries out of focus. Point taken about softness, some were manual some AF but I wonder if it could be shake rather than focusing? it was windy, not overly bright and I was hand holding.

@metroman - Thanks for looking Brian, it's my local stomping ground so I thought I'd try something different.
 
@ancient_mariner - Thanks for taking the time Toni, I really appreciate it. I was in two minds about 5, it amused me the way they surrounded the cow and was very much part of the outing but doesn't really fit the theme. 9 was intended to be a bit of a counter point to 8, berries in focus, berries out of focus. Point taken about softness, some were manual some AF but I wonder if it could be shake rather than focusing? it was windy, not overly bright and I was hand holding.

I can see where you were going with 8&9. Just IMO for them to work like that the BG in 8 needed to be more blurred. I think in 9 you've focussed about level with the path in front of the wall, which only really sharpens up at the bottom of the frame. Some of the other softer images do look like they had shake, I'd agree.
 
I've just been back to Lightroom because I wasn't convinced I was that far off with these and here are a couple of crops that I hope show that some of the softness is coming in the JPG conversion, I don't know why. I agree they are not spot on but the JPGs above are softer

IMG_5618.jpg IMG_5622.jpg
 
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Interesting. I noticed recently that when dropping jpg quality to 80% in lightroom, while most images were fine, a few (especially those with detail on a plain background) were a complete mess.
 
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