The Cape Light

[baddness]

The weather was so weird yesterday. Sun with patchy black fog and rain clouds. I never seen the fog like this before and let me tell ya it gets pretty foggy here in the summer. C & C please :)

[Marko]

You have an excellent potential photograph here just waiting to come out of this image..

The lighting is mysterious and fabulous. Photographers often wait a while for light this good :).....

IMO there is nothing you really need to do except crop and put a border around it. For fun I might also play on the contrast a wee bit.

I say crop because the problem imo here is composition. The lighthouse is too centered. It needs to be on one of the thirds from that classic rule of thirds compositional thing. It would have been better to frame this differently in camera and take more shots where the lighthouse appears larger and off center. But as you have it now, I'd crop it and probably :) do nothing else.

Once cropped the shot is really nice. Go wild too with the cropping! There's tons of varieties here. Try to start off and get the lighthouse on one of the 'thirds' as in this diagram below...then feel free to play around but keep the 'rule' in mind.

For extra info: We did a podcast on this rule of thirds in photography thing here http://www.photography.ca/blog/?p=52

Here's a quick explanation of the rule of thirds for anyone unfamiliar with it:
This rule which is more of a guideline suggests that you divide the image that you see through your viewfinder into equal thirds so that it resembles a tic-tac toe board. Depending on what the objects of interest are, you can place them along the dividing lines or at one of the 4 OFF-CENTER points as illustrated in the square diagram below. Doing this generally improves your photographic composition.

Hope that helps!
Marko

[cdanddvdpublisher]

the lighting is definitely fantastic; as suggested, a quick crop might not be a bad thing, but it's a nice capture regardless

[baddness]

I know about the 1/3 rule, but when I seen the lighthouse like that, I got really excited and took lots of shots of it. While doing it, I thought of the rule, but thought that I could crop later. I've listened to the podcasts on this rule Marko and thought that you would comment about that again :) Thanks :)

Thanks cdanddvdpublisher :)

I think that I will be cropping and printing this one off.

[Marko]

I know about the 1/3 rule, but when I seen the lighthouse like that, I got really excited and took lots of shots of it. While doing it, I thought of the rule, but thought that I could crop later. I've listened to the podcasts on this rule Marko and thought that you would comment about that again :) Thanks :)

Thanks cdanddvdpublisher :)

I think that I will be cropping and printing this one off.

In terms of learning to take better shots, it's always a better practice to frame in camera as closely as possible, especially when you are thinking about it. That way the proportions stay the same, you have more megapixels to enlarge with....plus you just train yourself to 'see' better. :twocents: Trust me, I know it's hard and I myself still do a fair amount of cropping, but I try not to crop whenever possible.