holmes4

The focus seems fine, in my opinion, but the resolution seems low. I am not familiar with the a6000, but you may want to check the picture quality setting and also do some experiments with how you compress them for display here.

I have experience with both lenses. The 24-105 is far superior and is the lens on my R3 almost all the time. I sold my 24-70 and don't miss it.

Using Chrome on Windows, if I go to the forum home page it tells me I am not signed in, but if I go to a specific forum I am.

I gave up on the builtin geotagging and instead run Geotag Photos Pro 2 on my phone. This records location (including altitude), saves the data online (Dropbox or at the app's site), and I merge the data to my pictures using a desktop app later. Works very well. Even ignoring the lack of altitude, I find that the camera often doesn't connect to the phone.

I knew you were referring to the regular ads served by the site, in page headers and the like. I believe that this forum uses Google Ads, where it's Google that determines which ads will be shown, with some filtering available to the site owner. I hate web ads and do pay some sites I use to offset lost ad revenue by using an ad blocker. Google used to have a system that basically allowed me to "buy" an ad impression but show pictures of cats instead of the ad. The money went to the site owner. Unfortunately, Google terminated the service and has not replaced it.

A site owner typically can't restrict ads in that manner - they can exclude certain categories of ads. But I'd expect there are relatively few photography-related ads available and it isn't to the site owner's advantage to overly restrict the ads. You can do what I do and run an ad blocker. I know this deprives the site owner of income, but it protects me against malware in ads (something I get on my iPad where I can't block ads as readily.)

I appreciate the interest in making this photo even better. I can see how different crops have different benefits. Most of my shots tend to be landscape, so that is what I lean to, but sometimes other crops are useful. I haven't done much with square (Instagram) crops - an interesting thought.

You'll need to tell us which camera you have, or at least the model of the battery, as different batteries are used across Sony's line and they need different chargers.

Just for reference, here is the original shot, and that shot hastily cropped portrait-orientation. I tend to agree with Jaf-Photo that this works better in landscape.

Thanks again. I'm going to go back over the shots I took during the trip and see if any of them could stand recropping.

I do appreciate your taking the time to offer your advice. I'm pretty good on the technical side, but have a lot to learn on the artistic side. I do try, more and more, to compose my shots well. This one, though, was shot from quite a distance with a 105mm focal length (most I had), so I am depending on the 42.2MP of the camera to give me leeway on final composition. I'm not the sort of photographer who packs multiple lenses. When I've done that in the past I spent too much time switching lenses and would rather have just one general purpose lens that will handle 95% of what I need. Here's the latest attempt. I also brought out the shadows a bit. How does this look?

Ok, how's this?

I can't completely crop out the water jets, as one of them is, in part, in line with the kid. Possibly I could get rid of it in Photoshop - I will try that. Thanks for the advice.

I love the shots - I was just in Venice a few weeks ago - but something strikes me as "off" with the colors. The first one seems to have a greenish color cast.

Is this better? If I crop even closer, I cut off too much of the fountain jets and it looks weird.