I love both of these photos, and am not qualified to offer any critiques of either…

I, also, do not photograph as many of our fellow UHH’ers; but I have learned so much here and appreciate their knowledge sharing so very much.

I was struggling with the same question about what equipment to travel with because that stupid (?) phone does so much. However, I just returned from a weekend celebrating our granddaughter’s graduation from Cal Poly SLO, and the family photos are all great using that phone; BUT, I don’t have a decent, clear photo of her walking the stage, like I do of her two older cousins. Never again! That camera and a long lens will be going with me every time!

So, I say, take the camera and lens that produce the results that make you smile when you go into your production process.

My practice is "It depends!" My practice is to [generally] leave my WB on Auto and deal with any WB issues in post. Only when I know the type of light will I use another WB or use a custom WB.

Your camera and your brain don't work the same. If you're in odd lighting and you see something your brain knows is white, it remembers it as white and adjusts and remembers the other colors accordingly. For instance, reading under incandescent vs sunlight lighting, you don't see the pages as yellow/orange. You see those pages as white in both cases. I typically adjust the colors of an image to the way I remembered them, not necessarily as the camera recorded it.

The other consideration is when people are in the scene. I'll [generally] adjust the colors until the skin tones are correct, again, not what the camera recorded unless it's obvious in the image that the lighting is causing a very pronounced color shift.

There are images where I'll leave the color cast or even accentuate it for creative intent.

In your images, I would have corrected for the color cast. I would likely have remembered the scene as the white's being white. There's nothing in either scene that I can identify that would lead the viewer to recognize that it was shot in early sunrise light. You may want to keep the color cast since it reminds you of the beautiful morning and experience you and your wife had together. But the casual viewer seeing these images without the context of your experience would likely just see off color images. So "it depends" upon your intent.

Mike

Looking fairly critically at both photos I have a few questions to ask. Have both had the same post processing (or not) done for sharpening? Is all about Bokeh and depth of field?

Sharpness is up for grabs without knowing what kind of PP was done. In my opinion they both seem fairly similar. How much further for sharpness you could take them is up to you and your software.

For bokeh, of course the 600 @ f4 wins. Then again, I have achieved the same results in Lightroom PP by either painting or doing a subject highlight and then inversing it so it becomes background and then applying both sharpness and clarity to the left and futzing around with sharpness as well you can fairly well duplicate the result.

No single definitive answer, but there are probably one or two key words that point to necessary basic ingredients. One such key word is "interest", which is multi-faceted and has far reaching implications. For example, an image can evoke personal interest, and that can take various forms such as emotional interest, intellectual interest, curiosity etc. On a less personal level we could add things like visual interest.

Images can evoke many things apart from interest, so on an even more basic level we could include "evocative" as another key word. There are no doubt various other ways an image can engage our attention (which points to another key word -"engaging").

The title of the thread asks "What" as opposed to "In what way", so I suppose an answer requires specifics rather than general concepts. But the key words give us a starting point and specific areas to focus on. Apart from that, defining concepts like visual interest could be tricky, so I'll resort to the old saying "I know it when I see it".

I would rate the following image as one of the more engaging photos I've taken in recent years. Technically the foreground trees are a bit soft so it's not without its flaws, but the play of light on the mountainside makes it a very viewable image IMO, and that is where the viewer's attention will tend to gravitate. Because the focus of attention is off in the distance, the image has a noticeable 3D quality. Apart from that, a common quality that landscape photos often have is pleasantness.
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Mission accomplished I'am about the same way as you. I shoot NCAA Football and Basketball for the University of Michigan. And yes I happen to be a Wildlife and Bird Photog as well. I can get away with my 70-200mm f2.8 and my 85mm f/1.8 for Hockey and Basketball, but for Baseball I mainly use my 600mm f/4 or my 400mm f/2.8. I shoot Nikon but it really has me doing the same thing as you do. You are nailing your shots right in the sweet spot from what I can see. Great work and keep on doing what you are. I'm very impressed. Doesn't it seem like we stick to Our ways when all things work? I did get the Nikon 500mm f/5.6 PF lens and that has made things a little lighter on the trails.

Kudos to you and your wife for your great shots. Birding is not in my shooting repertoire so forgive me for taking a different approach. There is no mention if these are SOOC or have had any PP done. The backgrounds provide obvious different perspectives as shown, but if the background was simply PP to be darker or toned down enough for greater separation to make the Red Kite stand out more ...would you have the same perspective with the lenses? I ask since I am considering an upgrade to the R5 or R6 line.