Quote (Fil @ Nov 22 2016 01:08pm)
Maybe you are right. Maybe I can edit it out :)
Without it there I would actually feel that it's worth putting more time into the picture.
I'll give it a try :D
I think what's really missing out of your shot is a story. Every long exposure photo should tell a story, even if it's not consciously obvious (note that I'm talking about long exposure for the purposes of conveying flow of time, rather than long exposure for the purposes of gathering sufficient light to expose something).
Story - What an image conveys
Flow - The journey you experience upon viewing the image (where your eyes are lead to)
An easy way to fix that would be to have a bigger image (panorama of 2, 3, or 4 images, to add what you can see vertically). You could then show trees, additional rocks, the sun, etc. Show where, in this particular story, the water is coming from. You can even, in Lightroom/Photoshop, add a fake sun (plus sunstar if you want), to exaggerate and add an interesting element.
As things stand, this is 1/2 to 2/3 of the story. You can see that the middle of the story is the water dropping. You can see that the end of the story is the rocks and the water flowing into the viewer. There is a sense of wonder at the end, but the beginning is cut short. That is, at the end, one wonders where the water will continue to go, past the point of the rocks. But, the picture does not offer a beginning, and hence does not provide a sense of wonder about what precedes the picture's beginning.
While these types of photographs do not require a main subject (a protagonist), such an addition can totally change the effect. The most common example would be to have a model pose in the photograph; the focus wouldn't be the model, but the story, and the model would just fit in that story.
I think colour, dynamic range, and overall interesting components come after all of that.
While I'm not the greatest of photographers, here's an example of a picture I took which tells a bit of a story, but my girlfriend didn't want to be a player in it. My image certainly wouldn't earn a 100%. I edited it as beset I could, because I didn't get to take it during a sunset (a sunset version would've been amazing). If I cut the sky short, I would've had some technically interesting elements, but the story wouldn't have had a start.
I hope that makes sense.
This post was edited by Canadian_Man on Nov 24 2016 09:37pm