It's almost as if I was standing there. So natural and realistic. Congratultions.
The opposite of.
The foreground is too bright for the background. A wonderful composition and theme, let down by poor* post processing choices.
* EDIT: less than optimal
+1
Interesting comments, especially written one after the other
First of all, thank you everyone for taking the time to view and comment, much appreciated.
To me, what counts in the end is if one likes the photograph or not: and I very well know that it's not possible (as it shouldn't be) that everyone likes it, especially if there are "different than expected" choices involved, i.e. regarding compositions, use of filters, post-processing, etc., and I am happy that this is the way it is. It would be terrible if everyone liked the exact same things as everyone else in the exact same way. In the end, you can debate personal taste endlessly (and to no avail), so it sort of become all moot points...
What is important to me is that someone's "choices" (my choices in this case) are really made out of... choice, if you forgive me the pun, rather than having people passing for "choices" what really is ignorance, technical weaknesses, and such. In the case of this photo I used a 0.9 Hard Grad ND combined with a 0.6 Soft Grad ND at the time of the shoot, not in post; so, besides the impossibility to define "optimal" processing (unless you mean that "optimal" is what you like, and "less than optimal" is what you don't like - or what is different than what you expected for a particular scene), in this case the culprit is "less than optimal" use of filters, not of post processing...
In post, I added some vignetting to that already present (courtesy of the lens used), but that didn't make "the foreground brighter than the background": you can easily see vignetting effecting both ends of the image.
Let's take a step back now: since my aim was that of having a dark background, in order to draw the viewers eye to the foreground, the important question to me is: did I succeed? If so, my use of filter was optimal for my purpose; if not, it was less than optimal. That said, this doesn't mean that you have to like it, I am really fine with people don't liking my aesthetic choices on a particular image: that's the beauty of this wonderful thing called photography
So, someone feels like they were there, and that the photo was very natural and realistic - someone else instead feels that the photo is very unnatural. I myself am very happy with the image, and am actually very happy with both these reactions
On my end, I think that if a photograph transmits the viewer some emotions, then the viewer feels that the photo is realistic, natural, he feels like he was there, in a word he likes it. This, despite the fact that every photograph is, in fact, an abstraction of reality, and by definition cannot be "realistic", if nothing else because you are representing a 3D world in 2D to begin with, let alone using a wide-angle or a tele-lens with their effect on image planes and relative size of objects, and so on... but evidently this means that the un-realistic use of lenses is now considered OK and is more widely accepted than the un-realistic use of light, even if I still remember when "close-far wide-angle compositions" were frown upon and considered bad, a fad, un-realistic, no good and so on, and it wasn't so many years ago.
Anyway, when all is said and done, nothing that one can say will change the fact that someone likes the photograph and someone does not. And I am absolutely fine with it
