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I have to say that I'm fairly impressed with this image and I'm going to print it 23"x34", but I recognise it has flaws, which I'm going to enumerate as a kick-off.
But first, some background. This is a shot at mid-day when the shadows are deep and the highlights are bright. Taming those highlights and bringing out a degree of noise-free detail in the shadows was a real challenge. I haven't fully succeeded because I didn't bracket this shot with tripod. It was a hand-held shot at 15mm, f11, 1/125th sec., no IS (Sigma 15-30 zoom). The noticeable softening in the lower right corner is due to my not using f16. An unforgivable blunder .
So now to my own critique.
(1) There's too great an expanse of solid black in the lower right corner. I'd like at least a hint of detail there, but such detail (when brought out) has obvious noise. I should have bracketed.
(2) I used the wrong f stop. It should have been f16.
(3) The image is too 'fussy'. There's too much detail there.
(4) The image might possibly be considered as 2 images, left and right, with the strong lines leading to a confused mess.
In defense of the 4th point, I'm reminded of a point made by Professor Johnson in his recent article on Michael's home page, "Lens Equivalence", where he states that ideally, close-up wide angle shots should be viewed from close up.
As we all know, wide angle lenses exaggerate the size of objects in the foreground at the expense of objects in the background. Viewing a small print of such an image means that the 'enlarged' objects/subjects in the foreground are clearly visible at an averge viewing distance, but the more distant objects are not necessarily even identifiable at the same viewing distance.
The solution here is simply to make a very large print and view such a print from close up. One then gets a similar experience to the photographer who captured the shot.
For example, the centre of this image is really a photo in its own right. There's some guy in red there hiding behind a pillar, who probably did not fully comply with my exhortations for him to get out of the way. (In some recess of my mind there's probably a humunculus shouting, "Get out of the way. Master photographer at work " . )
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