Luminous Landscape Forum

The Art of Photography => User Critiques => Topic started by: William Walker on June 07, 2012, 02:11:40 pm

Title: Island
Post by: William Walker on June 07, 2012, 02:11:40 pm
Comments are appreciated, as always.

Thanks
William
Title: Re: Island
Post by: Slobodan Blagojevic on June 07, 2012, 02:49:45 pm
Rhapsody in gray?
Title: Re: Island
Post by: William Walker on June 08, 2012, 01:59:07 am
Rhapsody in gray?

"Rhapsody" I'll take. Not so sure about "gray"! Thanks  ???
Title: Re: Island
Post by: Jim Pascoe on June 10, 2012, 01:08:02 pm
I think what Slobodan was trying to say is that the pictures is very grey.  I'm guessing the sky was probably a deep blue, but the mono treatment just leaves it a huge almost featureless grey 60% of the picture.  Perhaps cropping off the top third would help a bit.  I think this is a picture that would possibly be better in colour.

Jim
Title: Re: Island
Post by: amolitor on June 10, 2012, 05:25:39 pm
I think this is potentially fantastic. The wisp of cloud upper left balances beautifully with the forms of the trees, so your negative space in the sky isn't flat, it's perfectly subtle, to my eye. I like the grasses at the bottom, giving another field of almost-negative-space here to echo the sky. The trees are really fortuitously placed.

The only quibble I have is that there seems to be a lot of local contrast in the trees, and in the small size we see online it's really visually chaotic and not quite pleasant to look at. It's possible that in a larger size this would be perfectly beautiful, but I feel like it's also possible you've leaned on a 'sharpen' control a little too hard for my taste.

If the trees were more of a coherent mass, and less visually busy, then you've got a lovely abstract with two spaces (sky/grass) and some simple forms (trees/cloud) laid gently on them. The forms resolve in to real objects when you look a second more, and that's a nice reward.

Honestly, this is a photo that I think would benefit from some blurring. If it were rendered as some sort of Talbot-era paper negative salt print thing, I think it would be shockingly fantastic.