Hello everyone, this is my first post with the group. This is an image of Kurkjufell or the Church Mountain. It is located on Iceland's Snaefellsnes Peninsula near the town of Grundarfjorour. I captured this while on a 10 day ring road guided photo tour in 2021 at the height of Covid. This location is said to be the most photographed mountain in Iceland. It and the waterfalls are the Iconic Iceland image you see in almost every travel poster and Iceland travel ad.
I wanted to do a composition different from the classic one that everyone shoots here. I wanted to get an image that most others don't get. I hiked upstream about 1/4 - 1/2 mile from the waterfalls. This is a three-exposure bracketed shot taken 2 stops apart, merged in Aurora HDR and finished in Lightroom. Base settings were Iso 100, 18mm, F/20 and 1/6 sec. Tamron 18-400 on a Nikon Z5.
ian I checked and unfortunately this was the full crop out of camera.
Hi Jim, welcome to the PRO forum! I'll want to discuss this image further during our next pro webinar in March. The colors and light are great in this, and I think the composition has got some real good things going on. I especially like how you used the flow of the water to lead from foreground to background. But, it is a little too tightly cropped on the bottom. I think a wider angle of view would have been perfect here, as you really want to have the entire shape of the waterfall coming in from the lower right. Unfortunately, that shape is mostly cut off at the bottom. If you didn't have a wider lens with you, perhaps stepping back a few feet would have helped you bring in more of the shape. A vertical framing might have also worked really well here, it would have allowed you to include more of the water down below and more sky as well, and since there is a lot of good cloud texture in the sky, I think you should have included more sky than you did. Do you by any chance have a wider version? I'd love to see that if you do. In any event, this has got a lot of great things going for it, I just think some key visual elements need more "breathing room."