Previous comments in your thread seem mean-spirited: judgements rendered but not explained. While one must always find one's own path, a little shared light on the forest floor is a lot more helpful than being tripped in the dark.
1. Clean your sensor. Instructions are usually in the camera manual. Plenty of guides on-line. One day you may have to wet-clean a sensor, but it looks like a proper blowing would suffice.
2. Learn to remove dust-on-sensor spots with software. It's quick and excellent.
3. Walk the picture with your eyes. First, let them wander — how are you, the artist, directing the viewer's experience of the picture? Is there _anything_ you can remove — by cropping — that doesn't detract from the picture? If so, crop it. Second, walk the edges of the framing — does the placement of the edges add to the effect you want? detract? Third, ask yourself: what does this picture mean (or, possible, "feel")? Am I communicating that meaning (or "feeling") to my viewer? Fourth, do something else. Then come back to your picture, and take the whole in at once. Is it special? Communicative? Evocative? Does it provide pleasure or information? How?
What do _you_ like about it?
Why?
My take:
• The darkest darks are too widespread and detract from the forms they would be better off helping to depict.
• The sky is indistinct and seems to sit more as stains on the picture plane than as forms in space.
• The way the contours in the sky reflect the contours of the tree-line is, in this picture, not helpful. (In other pictures there may be wit in it, but you haven't thematized either contours or wit.)
• The focus is indeterminate (wind?). Photography provides enormous amounts of detail, but very few actual areas one controls (as opposed to filling a canvas with colored mud, for instance, which provides detail grudgingly but allows enormous control). Focus, out-of-focus, and the transitions between them should be thematized aspect of every picture you make with a camera.
• The design (the arrangement of shapes on the picture plane) is dull from top-to-bottom. (It's OK from left-to-right.) Why did you include the foliage crossing the bottom edge picture right?
• The composition (the arrangement of forms in the space depicted) is good, with the exception of the picture-left edge. First, that edge feels like an awkward place to end the "box of space" of the picture. Second, the individual forms near and at the edge aren't treated sensitively enough. The snag at the water's surface, and the lighter branch that arcs over the water (and up from below in the reflection) are too important to be where they are in the composition. Either move the edge, or change the forms' visual weights.
_But_ the composition leads my eye back in space, from each side, to —
— an area of completely indistinct grays. It's like reading a paper left on a bus, getting caught up in a front-page story, and finding the continuation missing.
_And_ the water in the foreground rounds downwards. Generally, with water, the picture is stronger when the ground plane continues to project straight towards the viewer. Crop above the downward inflection of the ground plane, unless you want to use this round-down to aesthetic effect.
• (Relatively minor:) The exposure seems to have been made with the camera tilted down a small amount. Small deviations from plumb and level are usually discomfiting. Make the line-of-sight either horizontal, or not horizontal, but not close-to-horizontal. (NB: this can be fixed with software.)
Good things:
- Variety of plant forms and luminance.
- I like the lighter form of the far bank as it travels back in space. I like that there are two ranks of trees (an upper and lower).
- The surface of the water is among the successful parts of the picture, for me. There _is_ something there. Find out why.
HTH. It is nowhere near as bad a picture as one would think reading the comments. There is a good deal to work with, both before and behind the camera.
—Kirby.
