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Hi Cathy,
Making a good photograph is no different than putting words together to form a sentence… unless you are clear about what you are saying then chances are people going to misunderstand you or lose interest in what you have to say.
This photograph is an interesting example. We have a brilliant sky, a potentially interesting landscape in a river; the problem for me with all of this though, is that there is no clear statement about what you are trying to say.
If you were to have walked closer to the river edge, you might have been able to silhouette the trees against the sky. Doing this might have helped established a greater sense of place.
For some reason there seems to be a circular pattern near the centre of the river. It is rather distracting and adds more confusion than interest to the photograph.
Finally there is the sky, and although the colours are pretty it is almost overpowering the scene.
One simple solution I would suggest is simply to crop the bottom half of the picture (see the example below). Reducing the number of elements in the photograph will help an audience concentrate on what is probably the most essential part of this scene, the sky.
If or when you can afford it I would suggest making a move on to a larger sensor camera. The new generation a APS-C and full frame sensor cameras can handle challenging scenes like this sunrise a lot better than most compact cameras, and if you shoot in RAW mode you will discover that the results can be even more stunning. If you get a chance, borrow a friends DSLR camera sometime and make some comparison photos… I think you will see the difference.
Cheers, Anthony
Image Doctor's edited version
