Beautiful park in downtown Raleigh

[Sp3ed_Demon]

I saw this while driving home from a friend's house and had to take a shot. I'm pretty pleased with it, but know there's always room for improvement. So I ask, what could I have done better? The only real post I did was tweak the white balance until it looked like I remembered it looking. Composition is my main concern, should I crop the bushes out of the left side of the shot or do they frame it as I had hoped they would? Should I have backed off a few steps to get the bottom of the foremost wall into the shot? Anything else you can think of?



Exif data
Camera Nikon D5100
Exposure 0.002 sec (1/640)
Aperture f/2.5
Focal Length 35 mm
Focal Length 35.6 mm
ISO Speed 100
Exposure Bias 0 EV
Flash No Flash

[flytyer57]

As for composition, I wonder what it would look like from a lower angle and move the camera to the right a bit. There seems to be plenty of lines, curves and angles here to make a very interesting picture. Maybe even shoot uphill instead of down.

[Doug Sundseth]

I don't think the bushes are helping you much. They're too close in color and brightness to the vegetation behind them, so they don't have much visual impact.

Your color balance looks a bit cool to me (it's especially noticeable in the concrete caps to the retaining walls).

I think I'd agree that your composition would be better with the camera a bit to the right. It looks like that would give you a nice sinuous line of reddish pavement running diagonally across the scene. For that matter, even raising the camera a bit from the current position might give you a similar effect.

I think I'd also try shots with different apertures to explore the effects of different DoFs. The foreground subject isn't interesting enough (IMO) to carry the composition, so a deeper DoF might add enough interest in the middle and backgrounds to improve the photo.

It looks like you've found an interesting place to play with shapes and lines. Good luck getting the shot you want.

[Hill Country Hack]

I agree with what Doug said. This is a very interesting location and much could be done with it. Good luck and share what you get.