Hello @ephillips, I apologize for taking so long to respond to your post! Once things started getting busy with Mordecai’s arrival, I’ve been in catch-up mode ever since. 🙂
I’ve never been to Cumberland Island, but have heard SO much about it! Was it a day trip, or were you able to spend the night camping on the island?
Here are my candid thoughts as I clipped through your 15 amazing photos!
1. What an interesting place! I’m glad you included the entire architectural element. It would have looked bad if the wall on the right especially was cropped at all. Since the sky has very little texture in it, I might have tried to see what patterns or progressive elements I could have found in the shadows or grass.
2. What a beautiful horse! I bet the camera overexposed the photo in order to retain detail in the dark hair. I wonder if exposing normally and then brightening the shadows would have allowed the green in the background to be more vibrant! You might be able to do something similar with the exposure you do have, just darkening the highlights some. I like how the horse is coming around the tree, and doesn’t appear bothered by you being so close. Nice composition.
3. So lucky, getting to see some alligators! 🙂 Were you in a boat on the water to be able to get that angle?!
4. Seeing it up close, yeah, that is kinda neat how it looks like the tree has legs. 😀 I like how you cropped it so the horse wasn’t dead center, but down lower in the frame. And the horse and tree are the same luminosity values, so they do visually merge. Very nice. I might like to see a little more room under the horse, and maybe straighten out the photo a bit?
5. What an interesting looking palm tree! That’s a great subject for a centered composition. Would it at all have been possible to step slightly to the right so that the tree was perfectly in between the two boats? That would have made it look more intentionally balanced, to match the perfectly balanced centered composition.
And I’ll do the next 5 in another reply! 🙂