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Critique Style Requested: Initial Reaction
Please share your immediate response to the image before reading the photographer’s intent (obscured text below) or other comments. The photographer seeks a genuinely unbiased first impression.
Questions to guide your feedback
What is your emotional reaction to a scene like this?
Other Information
Please leave your feedback before viewing the blurred information below, once you have replied, click to reveal the text and see if your assessment aligns with the photographer. Remember, this if for their benefit to learn what your unbiased reaction is.
Image Description
I was driving along the small road near the town of Hope, AK when I saw an impenetrable dark forest on my left. I decided to explore it and when I got in and my eyes adjusted I found the light remarkable. Coming up with a composition was challenging, as it always is in the woods. I took several images over 2-3 days. After I downloaded them I was disappointed that I hadn’t captured what I felt. However, now, two weeks later I’m feeling better about these images.
Technical Details
GFX 50R, 45-100mm, f/11
Specific Feedback
I’ve had difficulty in deciding how to process this. I can make it brighter. I can add contrast. I can add color. Yet when I do so I get a more impactful image but it lacks the feeling I had in this mossy undergrowth. I will add more pizzaz in the other wood images but this one will remain restrained.
Robert Adams in color? 
You think you don’t make images like Adams, but I disagree. Many would pass this by as banal, but you infuse it with beauty and mystery.
As far as your comments - I wouldn’t add any contrast, color, brightness, etc. It feels appropriately dim.
Stunning, Igor. I think I mentioned somewhere recently that when I’m taking photographs these days the song the is always in my head is Leonard Cohen’s “You Want It Darker”. This image of yours is exactly the type of image that most draws me to do landscape photography - it is dark and mysterious. That is achieved by the light but also by the composition that draws the reader in to even greater depths of obscurity. A really wonderful, moving image. Bravo.
PS: As with Bonnie, I’d say most emphatically - leave it alone, you nailed it.
First of all I would like to say that I like either dark images or light images but not the more neutral ones. I don’t know exactly why but I think because emotions are better conveyed this way. I don’t believe that all tonal zones need to be there for a good image.
Secondly I have this theory about ambiguity being a key to a good image. A great way is to reduce the information available to the viewer and make them make their own sense of it. I think a dark image can be a great way to achieve that. I’ve been trying this but not always successful. Most dark images are not meaningful. Sometimes the mystery is meaningful and other times not.
Igor,
Outstanding image of the forest Igor - A perfect entry for the Weekly Challenge!
I don’t see this as being too dark, or light, or even “restrained” for that matter. I see this is just right! 
But to the observation of lightness and darkness, my impression is one of a dark place - maybe that’s too strong, but let’s just say it’s a place I wouldn’t want to be lost in at night… And to counter that feeling that this is - or could be a dark forest, the showcasing of the forest floor. The lighter greens of the mosses(?) appear highlighted - but yet I don’t believe there is anything but diffused light; which doesn’t matter, but the impact of the forest floor is significant, and transforms this image and brings it out of the darkness.
As with the others, I wouldn’t change a thing! Beautifully composed and presented.
Lon
It’s interesting you say that because when I was taking this image I had similar thoughts. Is this worth taking? This is the sort of image I would have taken when I started photography. Have I gone a full circle and come back to where I started from? And then a couple of days ago I saw the Robert Adams video. He states that Adams work is deceptively simple. You get the impression that anyone could take such an image. He goes on to state that part of it’s power is in its simplicity. So I felt a bit mollified after that. Not that I understand the significance of much of Adams work. But sometimes I get it.
I hear you. When I started photography I fell into an online group that was into the New Topographics stuff, including Robert Adams. I did not get it at all, so I read up, studied the genre, tried my hand at it, etc. And I still feel like I don’t get it most of the time, although I still make images like that. For me, it’s the glimpse of beauty in places that aren’t considered beautiful - sunlight glinting off the metal doors of a garbage enclosure, a majestic water tank in the rolling hills - that sort of thing.
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