PHOTO: Landscape. rejection on lighting

Rejection on lighting:


Hi 


Please could you feed back on this rejection as I don't understand what is wrong with the lighting - also I'm not invited to re-submit it even if I can correct it. I'm wondering if perhaps my monitor shows my images as being lighter than they really are?


The link to the photo is:   https://www.dropbox.com/s/t0vngdlubdq58dm/MG041.jpg 


Thanks in advance


Charlotte



Rejection Reason

We found the overall composition of this file's lighting could be improved. Some of the technical aspects that can all limit the usefulness of a file are:

-Flat/dull colors
-Direct on-camera flash and/or flash fall-off (bright subject, dark background)
-Harsh lighting with blown-out highlights that lack details and/or distracting shadows
- Distracting lens flares
-Incorrect white balance

(Edited on 2012-05-10 02:53:14 by TiggyMorse)

(Edited on 2012-05-10 03:13:01 by TiggyMorse)

(Edited on 2012-05-10 04:04:15 by kelvinjay)

Hi Charlotte,

The link still doesn't look right. It should be a direct link to tne image that ends in .jpg

I included a link in the sticky thread at the top that may help to get your dropbox images working.

Aha thanks Kelvin I think this should work now:


https://www.dropbox.com/s/t0vngdlubdq58dm/MG041.jpg

Looks like midday sun with dark, possibly blocked shadows. You need less harsh lighting.

There are some harsh & distracting shadows dominating the bottom third of the image. But I think that the top two thirds makes up for it. Personally, I would have cropped this to be square and then I think it looks great.



I think that the square crop would sort out any real issues the image has as far as lighting is concerned.

But the image does look like it has had rather aggressive noise reduction applied. The real problem comes from shooting this with a really poor choice of camera settings. There's just no reason I can think of to deliberately shoot such a scene at 640ISO at 1/800sec and f/14. It's almost ruined a potentially great shot that could have been taken at 100ISO and still had sufficient DOF and be easily hand holdable without camera shake.

You could appeal to Scout for the chance to resubmit, in which case I'd crop it as suggested and go back to your RAW file and try to salvage more of the detail. You could turn the noise reduction down and downsize it instead, to reduce apparent noise. And then you'd get something like this (click to see full size):



Which may be acceptable.

(Edited on 2012-05-10 03:57:44 by kelvinjay)

Thank you Kelvin, that's been very helpful. The ISO etc was because I'd been at a very dark waterfall just before & forgot to change the settings back! Dhurr - The problems of sometimes having to take photos in a hurry!

I do agree with you that the square format you've done looks so much better! I'm pretty new to istock & still haven't quite worked out why some images are accepted while others rejected, hence why I needed to ask on this one - but I'm getting there!


Thank you again for your input.


Charlotte

^ Yeah. It's easily done. When doing weddings, I've come out of dark churches a couple of times and been snapping away before wondering why I'm shooting at 1/2000sec etc.