Hints to pass screening successfully

[Nighthawk1977]

Hello all,

a few days ago I submitted three pictures, all three failed screening. For two it's ok I think, for the third I would like to get some hints for improvement.

https://www.jetphotos.com/viewqueued_b.php?id=6073996

As you can see it was rejected for "Bad Composition (bad framing / aircraft not centered)" and "Dark / Underexposed".

Exposure seems to be ok in Lightroom, not to dark, not to brigt. Picture was taken at about 4:30 and sky was rather grey and cloudy.



Would increasing exposure by +1 be better? In my opinion it is rather overexposed or does not represent how I experienced light.



What about framing / centering the aircraft? I cropped the picture that way, using the golden ratio layer in Lightroom, keeping the 3:2 format.
What can I improve? Cropping by rules of third leaving more sky left and right?



I would appreciate some hints so that I can improve my work and hopefully can submit a picture surviving the screening.

[TomEPKK]

Looking at your rejected pic - it's too low in the frame, fuselage should be centered between 2 horizontal lines.

[Nighthawk1977]

Hello Tomasz,

thank you for your feedback about the cropping. I changed that, what do you think about the exposure? Usually I tend to keep the look natural to have pic not brighter as the usual light is at the daytime. Lightroom has an option for auto-adjusting but in my feeling pictures are getting to bright then.

Dominik

[crisquijano]

Hi Nighthawk1977,
Your levels definitely look better now but the nose is clipping. In lightroom reduce the whites until you get rid of most clipping. The image that was rejected was very dark indeed.

[Nighthawk1977]

Hello Cristian,

thank you. I'm going to reduce the whites, use the gropping that Tomasz suggested and try my luck again.


Dominik

[TomEPKK]

You may ask HERE before uploading the picture, screeners will let you know if the edit is ok

[Nighthawk1977]

Good to know
I'm quite new in editing my pics, tagging them, posting to Flickr groups and so on. Having a few pics accepted here would be a nice cherry on the cake.

[TomEPKK]

You have an interesting collection of airplane pics, some of them are worth sharing on JP for sure. You just need to work a bit on post-processing.
Best way would be to get familiar with JP Upload Giudelines - HERE
Second thing - practise, practise, practise And do not hesitate to ask questions to more experienced users!

[Nighthawk1977]

Thank you Tomasz, I'm more or less a beginner in post-processing, I started with my latest three Flickr albums. I uploaded the reworked version of a above pic today after it was commented to have a "decent chance" in the pre-screening.
Crossing fingers...

[PMN]

Hi Dominik,

The thing to remember is that your eyes and your camera 'see' the world in vastly different ways, because of that as photographers we usually need to concentrate on making a good photograph rather than trying to represent the scene precisely how we saw it at the time. Your original upload is indeed underexposed and the histogram is showing a lack of information in the brightest part of the image, increasing the Exposure in ACR will help and if you find parts like the nose are becoming overexposed you can try reducing the Highlights control to counter this.