Lame title, I know, I know. I couldn't think of anything.
I love that DPC teaches me so many things. In this challenge especially I learned quite a lot of things:
1, I don't like shooting black and white landscapes :-P (I preferred every single one of the images I took for this challenge better in color, even this one)
2. Foreground elements are a necessity for landscape pictures in order to provide a proper sense of depth. I had heard this said before, but didn't really follow it, until this challenge where I realized that all of my pictures with foreground elements were 10 times better than those without.
We'll see how this scores. Normally, I would guess around a 5.5. However, with DPL, there are going to be tons of fantastic images in this challenge that I cannot keep up with, so it is very possible that I will do much worse. Hopefully I will still stay in the 5s though.
Ironically, my best image ended up being the only one I took in full auto landscape mode. Hence the wacky shutter speed and aperture.
If I receive any critiques on this, I would especially like feedback on my black to white conversion. I always struggle between when an image is too grey (aka not enough blacks and whites) and at which point I have overcorrected it to the point that the image is too dark.
Statistics
Place: 240 out of 382 Avg (all users): 5.2734 Avg (commenters): 5.5000 Avg (participants): 5.2637 Avg (non-participants): 5.2917 Views since voting: 599 Views during voting: 216 Votes: 139 Comments: 3 Favorites: 0
How did you do the conversion? I find that the channel mixer is a great way to mix.
I'm breaking from my usual critique of commenting on the composition and technical, because you already seem to have grasped many of the concepts, just by reading your post.
This is not a bad image in any way, but there are some things that could be improved upon which may be reflected in the score.
One of the best attributes of B&W photos is their well thought out balance to the zone system. Wikipedia has a good read on this. You photo has the range of the zones, but its rather imbalanced. Most notably, you have a couple very dark regions (zone I, II) and some very blown out regions (Zone X). There also is no defined order to where the zones are.
If you look at the top 3 photos, certain objects exist in particular zones. #1 (the walls are separate from trees, the top level is separate from the bottom), it is very ordered. The same follows for #2. In your photo, trees/flora exist in widely separated zones.
The second important attribute of B&W photos is the simplicity and ordered composition. All of the top 5 photos have a very distinct order to them. #2 The bridge is the foreground element, distinctly separated from the cityscape. #3 The castle is contained in its own region with a line marking the sky and water. #4 The trees are very ordered. #5 The natural order of a cityscape is ordered again by the zones.
Your photo doesn't have the distinctness of elements in it. The bridge melds into the background, its actually hard to see at a glance and does hold the focus of the viewer. A photo which does not immediately grab the attention tends to get the default "5" vote as noted with 82/139 (59%) votes at 5.
So, one improvement may be on the B&W conversion. The second would be a completely different angle. Perhaps, standing in the water to capture the bridge from its side.
I hope this helps, and if you had more questions or comments, I'd be happy to respond.
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