Almost Walking on Water

[mortonnixon]

I took this a friends lake house. I thought it turned out well. Initially, I didn't like that his bottom half was in shadow, but now I think it adds to the photo. I like the balance and colors. I have not done any post-processing on the picture. I just wanted to see what areas you all thought could be improved. This my first post to the critique section. Any feedback would be helpful.

From Photos

Camera: NIKON CORPORATION
Model: NIKON D200
ISO: 100
Exposure: 1/320 sec
Aperture: 9.0
Focal Length: 28mm
Flash Used: No

[ericw]

haha. Neat effect. And the sky is very nice. The image strikes me as more of a snapshot or a novelty shot though - not really something you need to critique and stress over technically. Having said that:

There's some dust on your sensor in the upper-right corner, or perhaps water on the lens - something to keep an eye out for (or clone out afterwards).

The shadow in the lower portion bothers me as well but I think off-camera lighting would be the only solution in this situation.

You could crop out the building/dock at the right edge.

I think it's not quite straight - check out the water line.

It's an @$$ shot

Cutting off his foot bothers me.

If you wanted to further the illusion effect you could probably clone out the bit of dock he's jumping from pretty well. If you wanted to make it more of a eh... realistic/journalistic photo you could include a decent portion of the dock, not have him perfectly centered in the frame, shoot from his front (so we can see his face/expression and not his butt), and get some off-camera light in there for the lower portion of the image. Looks like a great place to be!

[mortonnixon]

Thank you for the feedback. You definitely have some good points there. I suppose it is more of a snapshot considering not much set up went into it. I appreciate you taking the time to review it. Fill flash would have helped. I was wondering about the centering because he is heading left but looking right, so I didn't know which area to crop. I did notice the dust, and I think it is probably on the sensor. I will clean that. Again, thanks for the help.