Please Critique These

Please give me your opinion on my photos.
Any changes I should or should have made.
All tips and tricks are appreciated.
If you wish you can also critique the Snow Leopard but I didn't want to break the 2 picture limit.
I'll do my best to answer any questions if you need info to critique.
Thank you!

IMAGE LINK: http://500px.com/photo​/133187539/

Lawnchair Dream

IMAGE LINK: http://500px.com/photo​/133187541/

Gold Finch In Fall Foliage Tree

the gold finch is a beautiful shot, might want to edit it to brighten up the bird a bit. do you use photoshop? if so learn to do a luminosity mask and selectively use it to increase the brightness of the bird. other wise love the composition and the colors. The other shot is also composed nicely and the sharpness and contrast are spot on. Love the bit of haze on the mountain the subject matter does not grab me particularly but the the mechanical aspects of the photo are nice

I like them both. But they could both due with some tweaking.

1- Crop the tree on the left out and some of the ground. Isolate more of the sky and mountain with the chairs just in the bottom. Tells a nice story of a group of friends/family spending time together with nature. I see this as a set of chairs waiting for their owners to come home from a day of hiking/fishing/hunting​. Later that night, they will be sitting and relaxing with a beer telling stories and reminiscing.
Looks like there may be some tags on the backs of the chairs.... I would remove those.

2- Brighten up the bird and play with the crop. The crop may be fine but I would experiment with a couple different crops myself. I would probably try to crop out most of the leaves near the top left edge. You can brighten up the bird quickly in lightroom or camera raw with the adjustment brush. Also play with the saturation some. You could really make those leaves pop if you wanted to.

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BlakeC wrote in post #17828844
1- Crop the tree on the left out ......

This is sound advice. .What would be even better than cropping it out would have been to have included more of the tree when originally composing the image. .It's presence provides a good "sense of place", meaning that its inclusion gives the viewer a better sense of what it is really like to be there in that area. .However, the fact that you included so little of the tree makes it look kind of awkward, hence the suggestion to remove it altogether is a good suggestion.

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Thank you,
I currently use PSE 11, but am planning on gett Adobe CC soon.
When I do I will try it. Do you know if PSE has the same thing? I can check on my own when I have time, but just wondering.
Thanks again!

Thank you for the advice!

I tried getting rid of the tags but I'm not really advanced in PS... How would you remove the tags?

I like your sugestions for the landscape.... I'll try those.

The sugestions for the bird are also good... I'll try those aswell.
I kinda like the softness in the photo, but I'll try making the leaves pop as you suggest and see how I like it.
Seth

I always keep my photos after I edit them so I still have the RAW photo of this image.

Also I cropped this photo so I believe the other photo has more trees so I'll try that and see how it looks.

I think I took them out because they weren't verry pretty trees, but I'll defenitly try it!
Seth


Left you a long post on my lense thread.