Critique Road to Nowhere

Oatcake

Oatcake

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Matt
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New here, this is my first post.

Took this shot on the road from Betws-y-Coed to Dolgellau (I think). I took it on a Fujifilm X10 and edited in LR, PS, and PPS.


Road to Nowhere by Matthew Martin, on Flickr

Would love to hear your thoughts/suggestions. I've since sold this camera and upgraded to a Sony A7R so I'm planning on recapturing this shot at some point.
 
I can see what you were trying to achieve with this shot but tbh it doesn't work for me. My immediate thought is that the "disappearing point" is too central, i.e. the point at which the road goes out of sight is right in the centre of the shot which leaves my eye stranded. OK so let's try cropping from the left. That moves the disappearing point to the left but also removes the sole point of interest, i.e. the mountain, out of shot. Cropping from the right removes the lead in.

I would have waited until something came along the road to give the eye something to settle on and scale to the scene. The colours also seem a tad washed out, at least on my uncalibrated laptop screen and there seems to be a lack of dynamic, The overall blue cast doesn't help.

Sorry to be so negative, but if you are going back you will have another crack at it. No offence intended.
 
great picture but agree with yellow
But the fence that tries to leads you into the scene (as on flickr) seams blurred out of focus about after the 4th post
Also not a lot of shadows in the picture
 
Hi Mate
Welcome to TP!
Anyhow don't get down hearted mate its a learning curve! Best thing Paul and Bob can give you is Critique! its a great way to learn so long as you accept it for what it is and also remember photography is subjective(y). Having said that I agree with the above:(.
I think if you learn something from every shot by the time you have shot a roll of film you'll be great..... (ooppss were not using film nowadays are we):)
It is true though! as you roll along all these little pointers will all start to click (excuse the pun). The A7R is a great camera a friend has one and it produces good results.

I think you are running out of depth of field in this shot, although f4 might be the sweet spot for your lens (?) the depth of field will be quite shallow for this sort of landscape shot. You need to be up around f11 + maybe f16. This will give you a great depth of field. (Have a read up on Hyperfocal distance). Don't push your f stop too far though else you might run into diffraction issues (another read up job). Don't worry so much about your shutter speed as if your sitting on a tripod (which you really need to have as essential kit along with a cable release) that will keep your camera still at slower shutter speeds. Just like Bob said you need an anchor or focal point something for the eye to settle on. If you don't have something in your field of vision, improvise. Park your car away down the road maybe on that first bend in the road.(or the wife:eek:) and walk back to your shooting position, use one of those as your anchor. A person, hiker or car will give a nice sense of scale too.
I must admit the sky in your shot looks a little weird to me too... I think give this some DOF a bit of an anchor and some nice early morning or evening light and you'll be away!!
TP is a great place to learn... every days a school day;)
Look forward to seeing some more shots Matt(y)
 
Thanks Bob, Paul and Steve for the pointers.

I don't know what I was thinking shooting this at f/4.0! I obviously took it before doing enough research/learning. I hope I wouldn't make that mistake now! I've learned a lot about focussing and hyperfocal distance since then, and I'm aware of the risk of diffraction at very small apertures.

As far as composition goes I was actually pretty happy with this until you guys shot it down in flames! Oh well, I obviously have more to learn. The problem with this location was that the view to the left was fairly uninspiring, believe me, I have about 20 shots of it and they're all boring!. I guess if I'd have had a wider angle lens, or done a panorama, I could've pulled in some more of the mountain on the left and that would have pushed the vanishing point of the road over to the right a bit more. Maybe the location just wasn't right, I just felt it had potential with the s-bend in the road and offering a nice leading line from the right. In regard to it lacking an anchor/scale, there were actually a couple of cars on the road but I cloned them out! I totally agree with you about the blue cast on the sky. That's something I need to avoid in future.

Anyway, don't worry about being harsh with me, I'm more than open to criticism as long as it's constructive! :)

Thanks again!
 
Matthew%20Martin-1.jpg


Here's another quick edit I did, this time much less extreme in the colour department. Note the cars and the farmhouse over there on the left.
 
also just noticed the house in the new picture your colour processing has taken it out in the first pic.
Just wondering if you had gone to the other side of the road so you looking down the to wards the house farm it may have given you a different perspective as the road may lead the eye to the house and the hills

we only giving advise but what you see and what others see maybe totally different also you will never be able to please every one keep up the good work
 
the ghost said:
also just noticed the house in the new picture your colour processing has taken it out in the first pic.
Just wondering if you had gone to the other side of the road so you looking down the to wards the house farm it may have given you a different perspective as the road may lead the eye to the house and the hills

we only giving advise but what you see and what others see maybe totally different also you will never be able to please every one keep up the good work
Click to expand...
I cloned the house out of the first pic because I thought it might be a distraction.
 
It's always funny isn't it, what one person see's something as a distraction another see's as a focal point. Its the spice of Photography I guess! Its actually what intrigues me, as when people (especially Togs) view photos their all see different things. I digress slightly, but I was amazed to hear that different people see colours differently :eek:, don't know if you saw all that in the news about that Dress someone was wearing? Some people saw it as gold and black some as black and white, some blue and white..... That would certainly help if you had a colour cast:D.

Your latest post certainly has a greater sense of scale! f4 well could be the camera doing its own thing in auto... I never trust auto anything nowadays;) especially auto focus .... I want to tell the camera what to do not the other way round;).

As long as your enjoying it that's what matters and there's always tons to learn isn't there!
All the best
Steve
 
There certainly is a lot to learn!

I've never used the camera in auto for the reasons you stated. I suspect I was in aperture priority mode and just had a momentary lapse of reason!

On the subject of colour, there was an episode of Horizon on a couple of years back called 'Do you see what I see' and it was all about colour science. There was a tribe in Africa that called the sky black! The bit that blew my mind was when they showed them a colour wheel that had about 10 shades of green and one shade of blue, and they couldn't tell the colours apart and pick the odd one out. They said they were all shades of the same colour. I forget the scientific reason for it, but from what I can remember so much of our interpretation of colour is based on language that without the right words, we just can't communicate about it.

Me and you could be seeing two different colours when we look at the sky, but as long as we both call that colour 'blue' it doesn't actually make any difference and we'd never know we were seeing two different things.

It was a very interesting documentary, watch it if you ever get the chance. There's a short article about it here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/tv/entries/24bbc4b8-58f9-373d-a896-274ae453ef2a

Edit: looks like you may be able to watch it here, I can't check now though because I'm at work:
View: http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xl7cgh_horizon-do-you-see-what-i-see-part-1-4_shortfilms


Anyway, back on topic!
 
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I think the second shot is lovely. I was up there a couple of weeks ago and the colours in the 2nd one are spot on to how I saw it. You could never call it boring - it's one of my favourite roads. Keep up the good work. PS - I don't like the colours in the 1st though, very artificial.
 
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