I wasn’t sure where to post this, I thought about Landscape but obviously this isn’t exactly a natural landscape, so here it is in everything else… I hope that’s ok.
I made a return trip to Wales recently - the area I was staying in was battered by Storm Darragh late last year. Having scouted this area one afternoon I returned very early on my last morning before driving home and captured this image of the massive clean up operation going on.
Feedback Requests
I don’t want to give away too many of my thoughts on this image because I’m very interested to see what people think uninfluenced. I really should provide a better request but really I just want to know - what do you think? Does this work? I will just mention that the colours on the hills in the background are entirely natural, I’ve tried to faithfully reproduce the scene as I saw it - as I do with all my images. But what I would say is that this image has taken a lot of work, I must have completely restarted the edit 3 or 4 times and I find that now, even having left if for several weeks, I’m conflicted by it… maybe that’s from being too close to it or maybe that’s because it’s simply not that good!
Pertinent Technical Details
GFX 50S II
100 - 200 GF lens
Exposure stack of two images
I think this is the correct forum for an image like this, Dom. This is a very difficult scene to portray, I think. A member of our camera club has a house in North Carolina and he and his wife were there when Hurricane Helene did a number on the area. While it’s a second home for them, they stayed to help with cleanup until power came back a month later and he documented the damage and cleanup efforts as best he could. I think that’s the key to a scene like this. As a single photograph it doesn’t convey the context of the event. I think that context is essential for something like this. I think that’s the main reason that photojournalism includes captions for photographs. While they may be worth a thousand words, sometimes they need a few words and/or a few additional images to provide the context.
Did you take any pictures of damaged areas where cleanup hadn’t started? That mated with this one and a few words would provide a lot more context and make this image stand out more.
As far as the processing goes, you have the bright lights in the work area, but you have the surrounding are lit as well. That may well have been the way it looked, but I think this might be more effective if you darkened the top and left side of the image quite a bit to spotlight the work area.
thanks Dennis - I’m not sure I have any others but I do understand, and agree with, what you’re saying. You’ve also made me realise one of the problems the image has, I think the top right is too bright and competes with the bright light, I’ll have a play with it.
I think this is a very telling photo and agree regarding previous context comments. May I suggest adding more contrast to the rhs of the log pile (particularly the ends of the logs) where the artificial light in that area has blown out the highlights.
I think now I’ve finally realised what the fundamental issue was with this photo I’ll let it sit again and come back to it down the road, perhaps. Maybe at that point it can form part of a series, that said I like the ambiguity of it and that it isn’t immediately obvious what is going on here. I just also want to correct something I said when I first posted this, my comment about faithfully reproducing a scene was too literal, I really just meant I’m not adding things that weren’t there - so for instance the colour on the hills is as it was that morning…. But the now darkened trees and surrounding area is darker than it was in reality….that light was incredibly bright!
