Wigginton, Oxfordshire

Wonderful capture! Stay well!

Admired in: www.ipernity.com/group/tolerance

Something doesn't fit here. Is it a mismatch sky?

50-50. It could also be the telegraph pole, cables and aerials which I removed and possibly the lady (with whom I spoke both when I began my walk and when I returned some hours later) walking the dogs, who's transposed from another picture. But other than those things it's exactly 'as was'.

I was referring to the colour, not the content. I know you do a lot of fiddling around with your photos, to try to make them what you call 'pictorial' rather than natural. You're also in the habit of transposing your skies, and this one doesn't look quite right.

Is it my imagination, but the sky behind the tree looks as though it might be the right colour,
and then it starts to go awry in the centre.

In pictorial photography, "right" means aesthetically pleasing, no more, and to me this is.

In this instance, 'right' means whether the light in the sky fits with the light on the buildings.
My immediate impression was a mismatch. I may be wrong. That's why I was asking whether you've altered the sky or tweaked the colour balance (which you so often do).

The light on the buildings is coming from another direction and is not materially affected by the colour of the sky behind them, which anyway is very close to the original.

Does that mean that you HAVE altered the sky?

Happy?

I see you have now replaced the photo, but, without the previous one for comparison, I can't see exactly what you've done, though it does look slightly less raucous. It simply reinforces my opinion that your pictures would be more "pictorial" if you largely left them alone (apart from removing the aerials and things you don't like).

That depends. Where the composition includes a large area of sky, the sky needs some detail in it. And after a lot of rubbish (cables, particularly) has had to be removed, the Clone Stamp tool leaves the sky area pock-marked, and the affected areas need to be replaced afterwards with new sky. This, however, gets complicated where there are tree branches in the sky area, because the sky visible through them cannot easily be replaced. The technique then is to dissolve the joins between the areas of original and replacement sky and blend them together as convincingly as possible.

In summary, where a mass of eyesores must be removed (as here) the original sky cannot be left untouched.

Perhaps more care needs to be taken when picking your skies. Occasionally the new sky is an improvement, but often there's a mismatch with the surroundings that sends the whole scene awry. In such cases, I get an immediate response of something being not quite right, though without knowing exactly what. I've since learnt to look between the branches to get an idea of whether the sky has been tampered with. Personally I would rather see a few aerials than a "pictorial" picture that has been so doctored that it loses its essence.

That said, there are promising elements with this one. I like the winter sunlight on the ironstone, and the figure with the dogs, but the composition is slightly off. A bit more foreground (lead in) would direct the eye to these features, instead of sending us into an expanse of overly blue sky.

Television aerials, telegraph poles and cables are so offensive to my eye and ruinous to the beauty of any scene that a sky that does not look completely natural is to me an acceptable price to pay for ridding a picture of them. And (this applies equally to the Brewery picture) none of my pictures claim to be unaltered and 'as was', as if there were some special merit in that. The World as it is (especially the man-made things in it) isn't perfectly beautiful to the human eye, and the photographic process can and should be allowed to improve on it, as is done routinely in other forms of representational art.

I agree that the photographic process should be allowed to improve on the original scene,
but mismatched skies and tweaked colours can sometimes have the opposite effect.