Residence

One's residence from seven miles away! C&C please
btw it IS level!
[IMG]http://i696.photobucket.com/albums/vv328/MGraley/IMGP0135small.jpg[/IMG]

I used to work directly opposite your front door

Shame about the haze and the flat sky.

Ah! The Horse and Groom! One of my favourites!
You're right about the flat sky - that's how it was, I fear.
The haze I like because it accentuates the distance, don't you think?

The sky needs cropping, its flat and lifeless and does nothing for the image whatsoever, I would come down to just above the tree, then maintain the aspect ratio by cropping the sides, take more off the right and put the palace on the third.

When the sky is like this your best excluding it altogether where possible, a bit awkward in this shot but lowering the camera angle would have cropped the sky and included more of those autumn trees in the foreground.

Its a common enough mistake but youv'e placed the main subject slap bang in the middle of the image, sometimes it works but more often than not it doesn't. learn from it and keep snapping

It's an unremarkable and uninteresting image in my opinion but you might be able to salvage something from it.

I's like to see a very tight crop of just the castle, a bit of the trees at left, bottom, and right, and much less of the sky. See what you think.

Well I think you could do with being rather closer...

You say that it's straight, but my test of straight is does it look straight. Often a technically straight image can still look as though it slants because of the image content, and this one to me is sloping to the right. Not much, but enough to spot.

The thing that would improve it most though is getting up to the subject. The distance is just too great and there is too much in the way.

More like this?
[IMG]http://i696.photobucket.com/albums/vv328/MGraley/IMGP0135cropped.jpg[/IMG]

Better I think, but I might have included some of the trees left and right in the original image to add a bit of framing, and a bit more interest.

Now that you have a better 'picture' (IMHO) you can see that the image degradation due to the distance from the subject is quite bad.

You needed to be closer or use a longer focal length lens. The latter would not have overcome the atmospheric haze though.

Can I have a go at it

Please do!

I had something like this in mind.




I think it looks more interesting but this is never going to be a great image I'm afraid.

OK here's my offering, cropped leveled 0.5% left, clarity adjustment and contrast.

[IMG]http://i453.photobucket.com/albums/qq253/jackitec/Res.jpg[/IMG]

jackitec's offering is about the best it'll be I reckon. Well done. I didn't have much time to play with it but that's the kind of cropping I was suggesting in the first instance.

It's much, much more interesting but not worth spending much more time on it.

Take the shot again with a longer lens, from a closer vantage point, on a better day.

You're right! The shot is too far for my longest lens - in fact I was astonished anything came out at all!

Thank you, Peter and Jack, for taking time to show me better versions.

Thank you, John, for reminding me that looking right is more important than being right

That leaves one question:

The sun on Friday was bright and low - one of those days when you needed sunglasses if you looked southwest. I had hoped the haze in the pic helped to capture that effect. If it failed, what suggestions have you about how to improve that aspect another time? ::

Thanks for that Mannesty, couldn't do much about the mist but that's the way I think I would have taken it.
I do try sometimes.