I’m having trouble coming up with titles. This was never meant to resemble a skull. It’s not meant to resemble anything. I just like spherical objects. I have several versions of this image but this one with less intense sunlight appeals to me the most at this time. This might look good as a b&w also. I should experiment with that perhaps.
Your comments are always helpful.
D810, Tamron 24-70, tripod
Now who could have taken this image? Ha! This may be my favourite of this group from the Alabama Hills. But this brings up a really important point for me - the power of collections or series. Individually, all of these images you’ve posted have impact but nothing, I suspect, like the impact they would have viewed as a collection. I’m not sure what the rules for this site are, at this point. I know things were opened up to allow more than one image to be shown at a time but I’d love to see this group of yours, together. The challenge in a series is for each image to inform the other without being repetitive. I think this group that you have been working on do build on each other and through looking at them together, I would get a feel for this landscape that no single image could offer. I hope to get a chance to see them that way.
This is the best so far, Igor. This is excellent. The thing that immediately hit me was the different shapes. The circular rock, square rocks, cylindrical rocks, rocks that are just blobs, all kind of great rocks. Your composition is perfect IMHO, as is your processing. You’re right with your B&W thoughts, but I enjoy the muted colors here as well. I only have one slight nit, and that’s the negative area of the left of the BG. I played with some different cropping but couldn’t improve upon it, so I dodged the boulder and burned the sky a wee bit to reduce the contrast between the two BG elements, but I don’t know if that helped either. All in all, a really nice image! Kudos.
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Original
Well, I’ll be damned. You never know what people will like. I was going to wrap this series up even though there are a couple left. They’re definitely inferior so this is the last. Although, I thought the same about this one.
Yes, perhaps it’s time to move on from rocks.
I would say not your strongest of the series, but I like it, without the sky. I would crop down and eliminate the sky, further emphasizing the boulder and removing something I find pulls me out of the image. A series would be good.
I considered that and decided I didn’t like it as much.
I wasn’t sure about the inclusion of the sky on the left but decided I liked it more than having all rocks. I thought it made the composition more complex and interesting. I do like your dodging of the rock on the right but perhaps not so much because I like the tonal separation between midground rocks and large boulder.
If you had pure sky going from left to right would this be better? Perhaps it would. But the comp would be simpler and maybe less interesting?
I agree, I prefer having some sky rather than having all rocks.
Yes, I think it would be less interesting. The way you have the large cut off rock in the URC creates a much more dynamic and unusual composition. That rock carries a lot of visual weight, and makes this image more unique looking. When I view this image, the left to right flow of the rocks has my eye end in the URC. and thus the sky is not a distraction. Now if you had all sky but not the large rock in the URC, then it wouldn’t work as well for me.
So this image works very well for me as presented, I like your complex composition.
Everything has been said. This soft light you have been getting in Alabama Hills has worked really well for this series, Igor. I am also in favor of the sky but I don’t see the skull, which is fine because the composition works. I really like the round rock in the FG doesn’t touch the “chute” in the BG.
