Autumn 1

Offering a critique after seeing you image in the monthly critique thread in the Photography Forum.

A couple points hit me immediately. The biggest issue you have here is the very flat lighting due to the time of day and the weather conditions. The conditions are very overcast and the first thing that overcast days do is to diffuse the light and make it very soft. You can see it in images that have very little shadow as the light can't create any, which in turn leads to very flat colours. What you need here is more contrast in the image, stronger light from earlier or later in the day will give that if the weather is right. You'll find that most landscape photographers won't even bother going outside on an overcast day as we can't get shadow detail in the images.

Another thing I can see is that you have is a lot of the leaves missing in the tops of the trees, this is letting lots of that bright white light in at the top of the image. What you could do is to crop the image down to a square format maybe and remove all the distracting white light at the top. This would then move the leaves to the top of the frame and stop the viewer escaping the image, hold their interest in the areas under and beyond the tress. The foreground is very strong and can hold the image together.

The leaves have wonderful tones but the grass to the right is a little washed out, you could do a little bit of selective colouring in the green channel in that grass area, don't do it to the whole image as the yellows in the leaves will get affected.

The use of the rail tracks is a brilliant idea, it helps to give the viewer somewhere to start looking and it follows the line of the trees perfectly, brilliant use of leading lines.

When you shoot an image do a sweep of the frame, move your eye from top left and top right to the opposite corner. Check for things that should not be there. Everything needs to be in a photograph for a reason. If you don't like something move yourself or move the thing if you can, if you can't do either then you start to consider if you can edit the image after you get home, to remove distracting objects. Consider how your going to hold the viewer's attention, stop them getting bored and leaving the frame.