Total judging points: 23
Judge's Comments:
1. This image has a lot of potential. It has good focus and composition (even a couple of leaves blowing in the wind), but the exposure is a bit uneven. This judge suggests reducing the highlights of the upper left portion of the image and, to a lesser degree a bit beyond the tree trunk to the upper center. There also is light area to the right of the spillway. (Consider using duplicate layers tin adjusting different areas of highlighting, Adjustment layers permits flexibility and preserves your original image.) Also play around with cropping from the left to, or past, the sapling and, maybe, up from the bottom. See how you like it...
2. I love how the photographer used a slow shutter speed to blur the water in this scene. I also love the overall warmth of the scene, presumably photographed in sunlight.
While I presume the cascade is the intended subject, the vantage point from which this was shot seems a bit ordinary. If the opportunity were there, I might have enjoyed seeing this scene from a different perspective, perhaps closer to the ground. I might suggest composing the image a bit more tightly to exclude the tree trunk, which doesn’t seem to add anything to this shot. And the leaves on the rock to the right of the cascade look a little too bright and draw my attention away from the cascade itself. I would suggest toning that down a bit in post.
Finally, while I do like the time exposure for the cascade, I wonder if it might have been too long for this particular scene and perhaps a bit underexposed. On my screen, the water looks gray, and more like smoke than flowing water. While I like the creamy look of time-exposed water, when the exposure is too long, the water can lose too much texture and start to feel static, as if it no longer belongs in the picture. Often when I shoot flowing water with time exposures, I shoot across a range of shutter speeds so I’ll have a variety of effects to choose from and possibly blend together for the most pleasing balance between creaminess and motion.