Untitled

[Riaan van Wyk]

Your thoughts please?

[shutterpup]

It's a little busy for me, but I love the color palette.

[Rob C]

Boy, that's a difficult one you've picked for yourself!

My initial feeling was to darken the sky quite a lot and beef up the internal contrast of the lower third or so of the whole shot. Then on thinking of how to do that lower part, I realised that the trunks would be quite difficult to work with. I suppose that what I feel is that it could have done with a smidgen of fill, but the trouble with that is that it would start to look false (memories of HDR that - shhh! - folks see to have forgotten).

Like I said - you pìcked a tough one!

Rob C

[Dave (Isle of Skye)]

Very spikey.

The sharpness of the elements within the image makes it feel uncomfortable to me for some reason. I wonder if a B/W conversion might tone down and flatten the edges of that sharpness.

Dave

[luxborealis]

As stated by Rob C "that's a difficult one you've picked". Perhaps the difficulty is knowing what your point is (no pun intended, Dave) with the photo.

What are you trying to say with this photograph? Knowing where you're coming from may provide us with the necessary background to offer constructive criticism and suggestions.

[Bruce Cox]

The attached version is less ambitious in scope; I have tried to play up the trees, but play down the atmosphere.

Bruce

[popnfresh]

The tree stumps are what this shot is all about. The beach, horizon and sky are superfluous. There isn't enough of the background to provide an adequate visual counterpoint to the stumps. I would have rotated 90% and made this a landscape orientation and repositioned the camera. As a portrait shot I think you needed to go in tighter on the stumps.

[William Walker]

I love the color palette.

Really lovely colours Riaan. I'm not crazy about the stumps though...

At least you got a comment from Rob...directly related to the picture too. I think that may be a first! Well done! 

William

[Rob C]

Really lovely colours Riaan. I'm not crazy about the stumps though...

At least you got a comment from Rob...directly related to the picture too. I think that may be a first! Well done! 

William

William, is someone editing your version of LuLa before you see it?

Actually, you're quite right, but that's no accident: I dislike people second-guessing (even by invitation) a done thing, but that doesn't mean that there aren't other aspects worthy of comment. It's why I don't post images on that type of thread, and why I thought that Without Prejudice made some kind of sense as an alternative image section on a site such as this.

Rob C

[Riaan van Wyk]

Thanks all for the comments- realy apreciated.

Pop, as a matter of interest, if the photo had an interesting sky, would it not have made the photo even more busy due to the allready busy foreground? I mulled over this quite a bit and decided it would.    

Terry, I'm probably wrong but the User Critiques forum in my opinion shouldn't have words and thoughts as a doorway for the viewer's opinion. The photo should stand on it's own ( not that mine does), if it doesn't then so be it.

 

[popnfresh]

Thanks all for the comments- realy apreciated.

Pop, as a matter of interest, if the photo had an interesting sky, would it not have made the photo even more busy due to the allready busy foreground? I mulled over this quite a bit and decided it would.    

I wasn't suggesting that the sky was superfluous because there wasn't anything interesting in it, I said there wasn't enough of it in your vertically oriented composition to serve as an adequate counterpoint to the foreground. A blank sky could have served very well for that, but I thought the small patch of it at the top of the frame it wasn't working in that particular composition. That's only my opinion, of course. As far as being busy is concerned, busy is OK as long as the composition is interesting. There are plenty of beautiful and busy photographs out there. But I wasn't there to see the tree stumps you were photographing, so I don't know if you could have found a more interesting perspective than the one you picked.