The river soar

[Guest]

Hi

 

I do the cover pictures for a local magazine, the editor wanted something fresh and local and I came back with this. He didn't use it but preferred another. Even editors are wrong sometimes . I may post that later.

 

[FUJI]

Bill, you have an amazing talent for Landscape photography.....this proves it beyond any doubt.

One of my biggest whinges on here is the lack of ......Landscape......opportunities in my immediate area, not counting my neighbouring Castle.

Here you seem to have lifted the ordinary up into the extraordinary......just how I'm not sure, perhaps you can let us in on some if your secrets?

Go on.......please? ;-)

[Guest]

The location was pure blind luck. Like you I struggle in my own area which is relatively flat (apart from Charnwood Forest) littered with pylons and steel sheds and all the hedges seem to be tall and scruffy so there is no real view wherever you look.

 

I  determined to take some pictures of the river Soar. Research in Google Maps suggested three good locations the first two of which were so overgrown with trees you could hardly see the river. Just outside Loughborough the maps suggested a long stretch in view and when I got there there was beautiful broken could one way and thick grey cloud the other - in the direction I expected to be shooting. I got out of my van and decided to see if there was a decent view the other way and found this and he other view which the editor decided to use. This shot was made on a Canon 5DMk3 with 17-40 lens at 29mm f16 @ 1/100 pre-focussed to the hyperfocal distance with an ND grad to hold in the sky. It needed just a little processing in Lightroom to make it "pop."

 

I think the biggest thing about landscape photography, and I still have to work at it, is that if you don't have "the grand view" to work with you have to really work to learn how to see what detail within the overall surroundings will combine to make a good picture. I recommend looking through the viewfinder (so the whole of your surroundings are not visible) and then slowly panning with a zoom lens to vary the content of the frame. Sometimes a picture will pop out, after enough practice using this the photographer will start to see the elements separated from the whole without the aid of the viewfinder.

[ChrisLumix]

I think that's a superb landscape, and as a non-journalist I would certainly have chosen it.

 

Just to get inside that editor's mind for half a second .. do you think it's possible that he wanted one single man-made element somewhere? I'm only guessing.

[THELONGMAN]

Hi

 

I do the cover pictures for a local magazine, the editor wanted something fresh and local and I came back with this. He didn't use it but preferred another. Even editors are wrong sometimes . I may post that later.

 

BiAll20140726029www.jpg

Great detail in a simple picture, nice work Bill,

 

Geoff

[Guest]

.. do you think it's possible that he wanted one single man-made element somewhere? I'm only guessing.

It's important on a cover that the text does not spoil the image and vice versa, the layout of the other image fits the magazine's cover layout better.