A Winter's Lament, the Spring Nest Revealed

[Chris Calohan]

[brandtb]

When I first opened this, I saw a dark black band across the bottom with a nominally interesting railing covered with vines...nothing interesting about these things or the composition of these things. The rather involved title doesn't do anything to "sort" all of this out...as titles can never do.

[Chris Calohan]

What can I say, Brandt, but to each his own but I see a completely different story.

[Ed Blagden]

I like it... wistful remembrance of happier times, or looking forward to happy times to come?  Or both maybe.  Anyway I like the composition and I like the toning.  And I get, or at least I think I get, what you are trying to say.  The title helps.

What black band across the bottom?  I see no black band.  Maybe the shadows could be lifted a bit in the bottom of the photo but no deal breaker there.

[Bruce Cox]

It seems lamentable to me that the horizontal oval, of the cast iron nest, has no fellow horizontals in the scene that might sympathize with it in its cold exposer.  It has center stage, but is the table top strong enough to balance against the rest of the scene?  More resolution in the image might help.

[Chris Calohan]

I see the centering rectangles in the railing combined with the two diagonals as eye-line leaders into the main part of the frame, and yet while the table is central to the title and the frame, it is the nearly empty vines, almost completely void of leaves that is the lament...in the winter months, nowhere to have an intimate morning or evening latte, or to sneak a kiss, tell a joke, have a private conversation. This image takes some imagination, some work by the viewer to make up his/her own story of what goes on behind those leaves when robustly full. I darkened the bottom as well as the right side of the frame for compositional framework to keep the eye from wandering. I see no reason to reopen the shadows and of course, the translation from psd or tiff to jpeg leaves a lot of detail out in cyberspace.