Luminous Landscape Forum
The Art of Photography => User Critiques => Topic started by: Chris Calohan on May 08, 2012, 02:48:03 pm
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Lake Fontana Marina, daybreak...lots of anomolies to contend with: bright background, rising sun, dark foreground and structures, and the golden reflections on one side, deep shadow on the other.
(http://farm9.staticflickr.com/8152/7152011773_a8b05dfb91_o.jpg)
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I like the background very much; the middle and foreground not at all. The middle and foreground is just a big dark blob in an otherwise pleasant(to my eye anyway)light image.
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The background IS nice, but the foreground is...I don't know what the foreground is. Open up those shadows a bit (if you have the room) and then we can decide if there is anything worthy here.
Interesting individual elements in this photo, but to me they are not operating harmoniously.
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I really love the geometries here, and their contrast with the organic background.
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This looks like the type of shot that could be successfully used as an illustration for a magazine article about that particular locale.
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I like the background very much; the middle and foreground not at all. The middle and foreground is just a big dark blob in an otherwise pleasant(to my eye anyway)light image.
Hi Chris
Yes. I do find the front to be lacking in detail, and frankly, interest. As you say, conditions were not easy.
I am sure I read somewhere that if you look after the foreground - the background looks after itself.
It is a little bit, how do you say it? Ho-hum? ;)
William
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I guess I shall forever be the ho-hum guy, but I told Slobodan that I am here for the learning aspect to take my work to a higher point, and not just be complacent with knocking off tourista crap.
I worked with both the structure in opening up its interior a bit more and at the same time, not wanting to lose the basic atmosphere I saw through the viewfinder, I also took a crack at the background sky to give it more depth.
(http://farm9.staticflickr.com/8008/7189153660_b13533450c_o.jpg)
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Chris,
I think I like the first version better. Opening up the foreground turns it into a commercial shot, even more of an illustration for a magazine article as Slobodan said, or an advertisement for the marina. All of a sudden the emphasis shifts from being a study in atmospheric perspective to a picture of a marina with a white boat in the foreground and a lighted dock area behind it. What William said about the foreground versus the background can apply if your focus is on the foreground, so which version is better depends on what your intention was. I find the second version more ho-hum than the first. The second is an outright, sort of ho-hum statement. The first is a more subtle suggestion.
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Good point, Russ. This shot provides a bit of an internal conflict with me, in that my original intent (vision) was more inline with a light study, leass than a commercial, saleable image.
In the second edit, I went solely for the saleability of the shot and let most of the art go by the wayside. The dichotomy is of course, which would have a higher vewer interest, and thus potentially at some point, be of interest to the marina owner, etc.
In this third edit (and now I'm beating a dead horse to some degree), I made a compromise between allowing the intended art of the shot to show through the potential customer saleability.
(http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7105/7189565036_bb7be88de2_o.jpg)
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This third rendition is the best so far, to my eyes at least. However, I feel that the marina as just too busy an element, whether it is light or dark, to work with the lovely sense of light in the background. The marina just shouts "Look at me!"
I wish you had a single boat or a tree or some other, simpler and less domineering object in the foreground.
I'd be tempted to try eliminating the marina altogether with one of the "Content-aware" gizmos. Probably wouldn't work, though.
Too bad. The background is lovely.
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What's this image about? What's your intention here?
I don't intend this as a put-down at all, I'm just not getting any sense of what your intention was when you pressed the shutter release. I can imagine a bunch of possible motivations. Could you write us 100 words or so on what you were thinking when you went "click"?
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I think #3 will be spot on if you can find some way to lose the shadow dude in the foreground.
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What's this image about? What's your intention here?
I don't intend this as a put-down at all, I'm just not getting any sense of what your intention was when you pressed the shutter release. I can imagine a bunch of possible motivations. Could you write us 100 words or so on what you were thinking when you went "click"?
I was thinking how nice the light looked and how many different modalities of light existed in one single frame. I wanted to capture all of it: the golden reflections, the airy but semi-defined background, the wide beam of sunlight radiating across the inlet and the depth of the shadows. I did use a .6 Lee GND but feel I probably pushed it down a bit too far, disallowing the clarity of the light from within the structure to show itself.
This was about ambient light, reflective light and the depth of the light. Some of it worked, some of it didn't work as well as I would have liked but it was only the seocnd time I'd ever used the GND, and from that, I learned a lot about the usage. Isn't it always about the light? :)
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Ok, cool!
So you're loving the light, and the juxtapostion of the marina in all its parts with the wilderness behind. My sense is that the light isn't emphasized enough, and the marina is too dominant. It's such a powerful form, with all its hard lines and dark shadows, it can afford to be much smaller to give the background and the light more room to breathe.
I think shooting this quite a bit wider, or from further away, to render the marina a small to medium sized foreground element, you can still have that nice pier leading the eye. I'd look for echoed shapes in the hills against the roofline of the marina, there's some promising looking ridgelines back there, especially on the right. Letting the marina go down so dark was, I think, a solid choice given your goal/idea -- the detail in there doesn't matter, but having it so big in the frame makes it obnoxious when it's that dark.
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Unfortunately, there was a quite narrow, funnel-like approach to the marina with high cliffs on each side and a horrid debris field of washed up crap in the foreground...I had so much stuff to work around but I so loved the light I was seeing, I had to make the shot.
Wider might have worked as this was restricted by my 24mm-70mm lens which I had closer to the 50mm side than 24mm to lose the foreground. Also, wider there was a bunch of houseboats all cluttered about which just added more confusion to the scene.
I think next year when I go up there, I'll take my jon boat and shot this from behind the boathouse. Now, how to fit a jon boat in a Mini...hmmmm
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I wonder if going to a vertical format would have worked better, given the constraints? Turn the marina into a black mass anchoring the bottom of the frame, and make it about the sky, with the pier and then the water leading out to the horizon, and by implication, into the sky? Maybe the light would be lost, though.