Hi there @ernestf-lloyd! Finally got a chance to sit down and look over these beautiful photos today!
My favorites:
– Sunrise-over-hill: Just a lovely scene all over! I love the sun beams, the colors in the photo are lovely, the clouds aren’t outstanding, but they are intriguing! It looks like a pretty place to be.
– Sun-through-woods-r-e: What’s not to like about this type of shot? I love trees. 🙂 You’ll see in my crop, I just eliminated the sunburst because it was so high in the picture, it didn’t seem like it was totally an intentional feature. I also adjusted the crop to bring out symmetry in the photo.
– Horse-pasture-green-r-e: Such a pretty pasture! Another place that looks like it would be nice to visit. The horse on the right is beautiful, too. I love the yellow wildflowers – they add a nice element of color to the photo!
What you could have done better:
In the cow pasture photos, I think it would have been nice to try to include the fence more intentionally. I’m not sure if there could have been an angle you could find to allow the fence to lead the eye into the photo better, rather than out of the photo.
This is especially so in the first photo. Between the fence and the clouds, the eye is pulled right out of the photo, which is unfortunate because I really (really!) want to like this photo more! As you’ll see in my edit, I tried to crop it differently to try to keep the eye in the photo a bit better (also straightened the horizon). It’s great how the one cow is set apart from the rest of them a bit.
For my three favorite pictures, I don’t know that there’s a whole lot that I’d change! Perhaps look for some more foreground elements to include. I guess I just might have tried to shoot more similarly to how I cropped so less cropping would be needed. 🙂
With the railroad, just be a bit more careful with symmetry in the leading lines; it also looks like there’s a bend in the tracks a bit further up, so it may have been neat to see if you could set up a shot with that. Also, be sure that the horizon is level.
Post-processing tips:
In my opinion, the photos seemed like the contrast was a bit strong in general; in the attachments, you’ll see I generally pulled out shadows, increased exposure and lowered the contrast. When I adjusted the crops, I was looking for things like symmetry (sun through the woods), placing elements on thirds (sunrise over pasture, horses), balance and leading lines (railroad tracks).
Other than that, rather than getting super specific on my sample edits, I’ll just say: if you have questions about edits I did on a specific photo, feel free to ask!
Potential Uses:
Great question! I’m sure someone else will have some good ideas, but I think some of these (like my three favorites!) look like they would make nice greeting cards, calendar pages or desktop backgrounds.
If you sell on stock, I’d say you could submit those three. You could potentially add in the railroad tracks too, and maybe the first cow pasture photo.
Anyways, thanks for sharing those with us! It certainly is fun to look back through old photos and revive some forgotten ones! Nice job.
