[irishwhite]

Hello, I took this picture literally mid-blizzard and it was with a manual 50mm 1.4 lens so i'm not actually sure what the aperture was when the shot was taken...but i'd love to know if there are any suggestions as to what I could have done to make this picture even better. Understand i was limited in time as my camera is not weather resistant and also i had walked 450 feet or so in about 14" of snow to get to this shot. by that point, i was just going to take what i could get and then get the hell out of there!

really i'm just wondering what settings you would have gone with in this particular case to get the most out of the picture. It just seems so drab to me (especially compared to the second photo which was taken at the beginning of my mid-blizzard walk from my home.

critique this image:




this just a reference:

[twitch]

Your image needs WB adjustment and a global contrast boost. At first I though it needed a stop of exposure but when I played with it it didn't seem to. Here's a 1 minute job thats a bit heavy handed but hopefully you get the idea. It sure looks cold there.

EDIT: I tweaked the other image too.

[GoremanX]

Is your lens yellowed? You mentioned it's an old manual 50mm, and my Super Takumar 50mm F1.4 was severely yellowed when I first got it. A couple days of bright sunshine cured it perfectly.

The white balance and contrast adjustments made by twitch did a world of difference. I imagine it would look even better when done to the originals rather than web JPG's.

Your top picture looks like it wasn't taken with the camera level. It's not much, but it's enough to be distracting. A bit of horizon correction would fix it right up. And crop out the right side to get rid of that weird pole/branch/thing poking in from that side.

Your lower picture also looks like it needs some slight horizon correction.

[juu]

I agree with above. Fix WB, horizon, crop from right to remove branch, maybe crop a bit from top to remove highlights that may or may not be blown, maybe not.

I like the picture btw.

[irishwhite]

Thank you guys for your comments! i'm sorry, i actually forgot that i had put this up here until now because i'm about to throw another image up.

I'm sure the images were not taken completely level. They were hand held and i was really doing my best to get the shot and then get out of the blizzard without risking my camera too much!

And yes, the lens is yellowed. I've had it sitting out in the sun a bit recently, but it's been very cloudy these past few weeks (we've gotten a bit more snow since these images were taken) and figure i'm not going to be getting much sun on the lens until spring.