Malibu, Daytime Landscape

Canon 5D mk IV, Canon 24-70 2.8 II

1/1000th
f/3.5
ISO 100

I decided to go for a wider aperture to blur out the front, and lead to eye into the frame, hopefully making it a bit more interesting. Please be honest. All criticism welcome. Thanks!

if you want more clarity on your intended subject matter you may want to boost your dehaze to lift some of our wonderful marine layer. Otherwise I like the composition and layout.

I like the composition, I personally think that the blurring does nothing to help this photo.

I don't think the blur thing really works, plus the entire foreground is so busy it distracts from the bigger view. I wonder if cropping it a little bit might work better, say getting the foreground just below that cactus, and then snipping off part of the left, which is just blank ocean and sky (if that allows you to keep the desired aspect ratio). I'll also comment on something you didn't do, the haze is fine, haze is pretty normal in most settings, if you try to take it down too much the photo starts to look unnatural. You expect (unconsciously probably) to see a certain amount of haze in a scene, if it isn't there the scene just doesn't look right.

Malibu is breathtaking.

One of the things I've recently learned with Landscape photography is figuring out what one is trying to showcase . Is it the shoreline, the interesting cloud formations, the hills or a combination thereof?
By looking at the image, I see that there is a very prominent foreground. Also, the top left corner of the photo might allow for some zooming in (I'm not a big fan of cropping postprod if I can avoid it), and thus focus on the curving shore. (This issue has been one of the main reasons my landscapes have been more abstract, and less appealing)

So in short, I would have placed my camera a bit more to the left (actually as much as possible) and then a bit higher, then let the trees nearby and any brush become the foreground, and then keep as much of the shore arc as visible as possible.

Lastly, since this is the image you do have, I wonder what improvements could come from cropping a bit from the bottom left about 15-20%, and then working on the hills, so that they're less blue, and more of their original color (that brownish green). That might do enough to direct the eye due to contrast.

My two cents.

PS: I Like the attempt to blur the background, though it came at the cost of overall sharpness to the rest of the image.

Here is the hard thing about travel photography. Often we don't have a lot of control about when we show up at a location like this. This is a very nice setting, but lacks drama because of the lighting. Unless you went to huge efforts in post, its going to end up looking more snap shot than dramatic shot. This same location at another hour... it would be really nice. Its a nice shot as is. But would be so improved shot at another time. No tweaking in composition is going to help too much with that. Also, the attempt to recover the clouds loos a bit over processed.

A nice shot, but not a portfolio shot. But you can feel justified in liking it.

Croasdail wrote in post #19022018
..A nice shot, but not a portfolio shot. But you can feel justified in liking it.

Expertly said. Long live Malibu.