Like all photographers, I take many pretty good photos (and a few losers!) for every nature image I feel is good enough for my portfolio. Here I show a "runner up" along side a winner, and explain the problems I see with the runner up. I hope you enjoy it!
It's too easy to focus on the beautiful parts of an image, and completely overlook big problems. In the following 'runner up' image, when capturing the image I was so focused on the beautiful clouds and how they mirrored the line of the cliffs fading into the horizon, that I totally missed that I was cutting off the bottom of the tree on the left. Ugh!
Luckily, I had taken a picture a few minutes earlier that DID have the bottom of the tree and a bit of foreground, so I was able to paste it to the bottom of the cloud picture in Photoshop (after correcting for the change in lighting and color). In the good picture, I also removed that bright tuft of cloud in the upper right corner that I found distracting.
Of course fine art is always in the eye of the beholder. What do you think: is it a big improvement?