The cliff is in the Eagle Creek Canyon that was closed for four years because of the Eagle Creek Fire. Hiking it for the first time since the fire, I had mixed feelings seeing the scenery that I was so familiar with changed dramatically. However, it opened new vistas and this image is one of them.
Specific Feedback Requested
I have another cropping of this image that comes in closer to the colorful rocks that I thought I would like better. After comparing the two, I came back to this one as it give the color some context.
Technical Details
Canon R5, 24-105mm @ 50mm, 1/40 sec, f/16, iso 640, hand held. Local and global contrast adjustments in PS
Hey Don! That’s crazy that you were finally able to return to Eagle Creek, I don’t believe I’ve seen an image there since before the fire.
I like the natural processing and the colors here, and I certainly don’t mind the additional context for the color in principle.
My main critique comes in due to the orientation and placement of the cracks in the rock, which is probably more of an issue in this “wider” view. The almost perfectly horizontal line at the bottom third, and the nearly horizontal one near the top, along with the vertical line splitting the frame almost exactly 50/50 up there, just feel very rigid to me. I understand that basalt columns are typically geometric in nature, but I feel like we need to see those shapes repeated for them to feel graceful and natural in a photograph. At this particular scale, they feel more like distractions from the beautiful colors and chaos of the lichen.
I would be curious to see the tighter crop you mentioned, as I feel depending on how tight you got in there, there could be some nice abstract possibilities that exclude the problematic cracks.
If you were to stick with this composition, I think the bottommost layer below the fissure would need to be darkened and cooled down, to match the top 3/4 of the image. I would also try cropping a bit of the right off, as it feels like most of the interesting elements are clustered on the left side.
This feels more balanced and concise to me than the previous image. There is some symmetry on the left with those two big vertical lines of green, so I feel like the right side is a bit extraneous. I would suggest a 4x5 vertical crop starting from the left side, and then I would vignette/darken (even desaturate) the brighter elements along the left edge.
