D750 Image Review

What is wrong with the picture. What am I not getting right ??

ashwin647 said:

What is wrong with the picture. What am I not getting right ??

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1. Exposure / Lighting. Always capture as much light as you can for conditions. This looks like a still landscape scene--no reason to use 1/400 shutter speed. You easily could have gotten away with 1/50 or 1/25 (or much longer if you had a tripod)--and gathered at least 3x-4x more light if you went with the same aperture. At minimum, that would have given you less noise / more detail, and more dynamic range for post processing.
2. Focus / Depth of field. You could have stopped down the lens a bit to F/5.6 or F/8 to get sharper corners and more distances in focus. You'd lose half of the light advantage from above, but still net 2x more light. You also appear to be focused too close. There's also quite a bit of compression artifacts and noise that further alters sharpness, so a lot of the trees and leaves looked muddled.
3. Framing & Perspective. Everything on this list is subjective, but this is more-so. It's pretty scenic I suppose, but it looks uninteresting to me as is. I don't quite see what I should be looking at. I also don't like the symmetry. The horizon is slightly lower than halfway (and the island is slightly below that), but not low enough to be interesting but slightly annoying--it looks accidental. The trees don't tell me anything in relation to the rest of the scene or one another. I just can't find pleasing patterns or make sense of it. What is this supposed to be showing me or how am I supposed to feel?
4. Post processing. There's heavy noise, little sharpness, poor tonal choices (shadows, brights, colors, clarity, etc.), among other things

Can't do anything about the first 3. They're set when you take the shot; but you can try for #4.

I don't know what "look" you were going for, but given the vignetting you have + clouds and sunset colors, one thing you could have tried to go for is something saturated & HDR-esque, like this to make the colors & cloud textures pop a bit more. Also crop the frame a bit for added symmetry, and add some more vignetting because why not.



Or you could have gone for a sort of "everything is grungy except that island on the way to the sunset" look:

I think your post processing skills, if sharpened, would give you much better results.

What do you use to work the files, what program?? Do you shoot raw and then a Nikon program or Lightroom or Capture I or what??

As others indicated, for landscape images, you should stop down to get more depth of field, that way you get more of the scene in focus. If you are serious about landscape photography, get a good tripod, that will allow you to use lower iso and experiment with long exposure. Landscape photography is best done at dawn or dusk, which means little light, so a tripod is a must. Then of course post processing to add contrast and boost colours, or clone out unwanted elements.

As important as the technical parts, there is also composition. Good place to start is the rule of thirds. You should avoid placing the horizon line in the middle of the photo, depending on what is more interesting – the foreground or the sky. In this case, it would be better placed lower, the sky is more interesting, that would also allow you to avoid that junk in the lower part of the photo, and you would still get the reflection and more of the sky. Also try positioning yourself better (take a step to the left or right) to avoid distracting elements like those branches in the lower left corner.

Enjoy you photography!

ashwin647 said:

What is wrong with the picture. What am I not getting right ??

Click to expand...

I think that owning, and using, a tripod is far more important that owning the latest and greatest camera, at least when it comes to landscape photography. If you're doing handheld shooting with a lens that doesn't have image stabilization, your technique would be entirely correct. However, even if you don't have a tripod with you, you've got a lens with stabilization, so there's no need for 1/400 of a second at 24mm, so you don't need the noise or reduced dynamic range of ISO 1600.

With a bit of noise reduction in post processing and a few tweaks, you can improve the image in question. However, in the ideal scenario, you would use a tripod, stop down for the sake of depth of field and sharpness, and use base ISO.