An intimate landscape image of a seedling emerging from a recent snow.
Type of Critique Requested
Aesthetic: Feedback on the overall visual appeal of the image, including its color, lighting, cropping, and composition.
Conceptual: Feedback on the message and story conveyed by the image.
Emotional: Feedback on the emotional impact and artistic value of the image.
Technical: Feedback on the technical aspects of the image, such as exposure, color, focus and reproduction of colors and details, post-processing, and print quality.
Specific Feedback and Self-Critique
Had to get low for this composition on a cold, blustery day. The sky was lightly overcast making the colors of the seedling very muted. Need to reach in with a color picker until I got the colors right on the seedling with outtouching the snow tone. Next , I worked on the colors of the snow and intinsified the shadows a bit, even the dim shadow of the seedling was visible in the final edit.
Hi Gary,
this is a very nice intimate scene, with a beautiful soft light.
When I open your photo my eyes were immediately attracted to the background. My suggestion is to crop all the trees on that background. In my mind will be a very quiet and subtle picture.
Thanks for reviewing and commenting, I see your point, however, it doesn’t particularly bother me. I did took a quick look at a crop and an image warp and found that based on the sculpture of the snow in the background, the top of the image doesn’t end well, as I composed the image. I’ll step away for now and see later if I see it differently. Again, many thanks.
I agree with this statement. The usage of a short DOF works very well here. I can see the appeal of including the bg trees as it gives a sense of context but still feel that a simpler comp would be stronger.
Gary,
I am loving the soft light on the seedling poking up through the snow along with all the textures. I would definitely crop off the OOF BG as it draws my eye away from all the wonderful stuff happening in the FG. This tells a very nice story of the life cycle of nature.
This is a nice intimate landscape. Good news is that the sapling survived well in the snow. I agree with @joaoquintela about cropping out the top. It’s your call; if leaving in the top trees matches your vision, then leave it in. I do feel the image would be a stronger without the top trees. Also, I might experiment with cutting back the whites a bit on the brightest triangle in the snow behind the sapling.
As y ou said, Gary, the jury has spoken. I mostly agree that it would be a stronger image with the back cloned or cropped out. But I also like it as is because it gives a sense of a space/place. Cropping most certainly makes a stronger image, but that’s not at the expense of the original. Both have value. Terrific image.
A little late, but wanted to chime in about the jury’s decision. Maybe feel like Henry Fonda in the “12 Angry Men” - just holding out the for that one possibility. LOL. Actually I don’t disagree that the top forest brings attention - and actually for me it’s not the inclusion of the background, but there’s a couple white/bright strips that are the real eye magnets. I can see and get what you were trying to capture with the near/far comp; it tells a better story for the sapling than if the top is cropped. Not to belabor this, but it does border on the concept of “if you’re going to include something, include it on purpose” And this is right on the border where even just a little bit more up top might look and feel better.
And so to that end, I thought I would play around. Maybe I’m taking this as a processing challenge - and we have another category for that. But I wanted to see if I could improve, or mitigate the top being more a distraction than a positive element.
For starters, I cheated. This might not be up your alley, but what I did was extend the canvas up top, select a horizontal section of the top and transform/stretch just a wee bit to give the appearance of more forest bg. I also then painted down the bright areas and also desaturated that top section a little bit. I think the result is less things to pull the eye, but yet enough of the forest to help tell your story.
Then you mentioned almost in passing the shadow of the little sapling, so I tried to bring that out a little too. And a very slight vignette.
Not sure if this fits your vision, but I think there’s enough there to maybe keep your original intent.
Ironically, Lon, I did play with the warp but because of the a snow bump in the uppers right corner it did not feel right. In the end I cropped out the forest and fixed some of the snow at the top with a clone tool.
It’s been a good exercise, I took away to look a composition from more angles and think about what the final product might look at. Cheers.
