The tranquil estuary.

[XavierG]

This is my second shot in the critique section of DPS.
The snap is a tranquil image of the Bilbao estuary (Nervion River) in the middle of the city, so it is a kind of urban landscape.
I do not know why is it that I like this shot. Is it the quietness? Is it the monochrome appearance?
I have doubts about the brightness. Could it be better a bit brighter?

EXIF:
Nikon D5000 with AF-S Nikkor 70-300 VR
Focal : 240mm
Aperture : f/5.6
Shutter : 1/125
ISO : 200
Flash : Flash did not fire.

I am looking forward your critics.

XavierG

[curelightwounds]

It's pretty good. The composition is nice. I'd probably back it up a little more, though. It could stand to be exposed a little more. I would increase the exposure and the contrast to bring up the colors and lighten up the image.

Before you do that there are two other things that you should do first:
1) Lens correction. There's a slight bowing in the hand rail and the platform that should be straightened out. I would also rotate the image slightly so that the platform and rail are parallel with the bottom of the frame.

Simple rule of thumb that someone gave me when I first started shooting, "straight lines should be straight."

2) If it's not too hard, I would go back and shoot it again. There are a couple reasons for this:
a) It's blurry. I've never seen an effective fix of a blurry image. Either it's out of focus or there was some vibration when you took the image, but everything that should be sharp is fuzzy and that makes it hard to focus.

Any kind of fix in this department is going to have to deal with the zoom lens you're using. I see it was shot at 240mm so you want to shoot at at least 1/240 sec. Alternately you could use a tripod or move closer to the subject. The trade off with a zoom lens is that you can be far away and capture something, but any movement on your end is going to be magnified in the image.

And I would back up a little bit to catch a little more to the left of the platform. I would back it up until the left side of the platform just touches the left third of your frame.

b) When shooting water, unless it's perfectly still, using a ND filter and longer exposure will blur the water a little bit since reflections on ripples, more often than not, don't add much to a photograph.

[S_Sanyal]

Its a fantastic subject.

Composition is ambivalent: hard to say if it follows rule of thirds, but in this case,it has great potential. It may have helped to step back a bit and and have the waterline run through centre of frame.

I have an issue with the lighting, its too dark an image. I'm guessing you wanted a moody feel as thats what comes across. Thats fair enough, but it it was a wee bit better illuminated (maybe exposed for 1/60s or 1/80s instead of 1/125), I think the reflection of the steps in the water would be more pronounced (its too subdued here, to the point of getting lost). This would also emphasise the symmetry in the picture, as well as the mood.

Overall, a great picture with great potential.

[Craigger]

It's a great photo and the critiques from curelightwounds and S_Sanyal, I think, are right on the money so I would just add onto the 2 things that I immediately thought of before reading the replies.

The blurryness that is noted might also (probably) be due to the D5000 consistenly producing soft images even though the focus is actually bang on. I really struggled with mine until I found someone who suggested increasing the sharpness in the Picture Control option by 2 or 3 points. This will take that last little bit of fuzziness out of your D5000 photos.

And in regard to the comment about the water and the ND filter, I couldn't agree more. I might have gone with quite dark filter and increased the exposure time to smooth out the reflection.

[Krusty79]

This is not the typical type of shot I would take, but I like it. I think the green moss gives the image a gritty feel and breaks up the color. I did look at a histogram of the shot and the pixels are skewed towards the underexposed side, but I don't think there is a clipping problem. This can be easily adjusted if you shot RAW.

That's an interesting point about shooting reflections off ripples - I will keep that in mind.