We had quite a dramatic sky in the north west of England last night. I was only able to catch a few shots before the sun said goodbye, one of which was:

46 views and no comment?

The silence is deafening...

You may want to read "the difficulty of an honost critique" in this same forum section...

lol!

I prefer simple honesty.

If it stinks, it stinks...

I simply was pressed for time when I came by here before, but I will say a couple things now:

1. I see the interest in the sky, but how is the composition helping bring that across to the viewer? There are a lot of fuzzy black clouds in the middle, separating two areas of very nice color.

2. When one has such a clear horizon in the photo, given no artistic reason to keep it crooked, straigten it (this is from someone whose photos are almost always 3 degrees off plumb--I guarantee to you that people notice).

I like the colors in the sky, and would have loved to see it, but I feel that there is a huge gap that has little to no interest in between the two extremes of the image.

Personally, the portrait orientation doesn't do it for me. I would much prefer a much tigher crop of just the red and the surrounding dark clouds.

Just my 2 cents.

I agree. In looking at it, the image almost seems to be two images one above the other, separated by that cloud layer. I would do away with most of the sky and tighten the shot...

Mike.

If you crop it down it is pretty dull. This way it looks like a bomb pop. (Although I think the colors are out of order.) And we all know bomb pops are cool.

If you get a "view" on Flickr every time someone passes along and reads the thread -- as I did just now -- then you'll get a lot more "views" than there are people actually looking at your picture.

As for the critique, I'm with larkvi on this one.

Given the huge dark area, you might have been better off with either a narrower or wider angle of view.

I can certainly see why you wanted to take the photo, though; the clouds in the upper part are magical, but ...

I'm not sure what the subject is suppose to be. And when I look in the spots where I might expect a subject, nothing there. No matter how grand, there are time to just look at a sunset.

Thank you for the replies I've only just seen them, so apologies for the delayed reply.

This picture actually came about from walking past my front living room, and seeing a lovely red light entering through the windows and onto the wall. I'm no landscape photographer (as you can very well see ), but the colours caught my eye.

The sun went down a lot quicker than I was anticipating, and as such I only had chance to take a few snaps, which is basically what the shot is - at best, a snap. The shot was taken hand held from out of my window - hence it being wonky (my laziness also played a part here ).

The comments made are definitely food for thought, and let me give my thanks for pointing me in the right direction