I have been working on a project lifting up the beauty of mountain glaciers, and highlighting the kinds of landscapes that we risk losing over the next decades in many places due to climate change. As a professor/glaciologist, I am fortunate that I get to visit these amazing features somewhat regularly, and thus get to see their different personalities and moods. This is an image from a glacier in Argentine Patagonia, taken from the steep mountain slope directly opposite the glacier tongue. I was drawn to this scene by the contrasting shapes: smooth swirls of clean and dirty snow in the remaining winter drifts, the strong rectangular patterns of the crevasse field above, and the utter blue chaos of the ice fall below.
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
Thank you, Tim, for taking the time to offer your insights into our photography. As with pretty much everything else in my life, I suffer from a pretty significant case of “imposter syndrome” as a photographer, and it’s really hard for me to objectively judge the quality of my work compared to others. Make no mistake, I shoot for my own enjoyment, and I’ll continue to find great enjoyment in this image no matter the other opinions about it, however I am definitely eager to get a sense of how it stacks up in a competition context. Thanks in advance for giving it to me straight!
Technical Details
400 mm, f/18, 1/200 sec, ISO 100.
Where this might not qualify for NLPA is that I have significantly desaturated the upper part of the scene in order to make the blue in the lower icefall more robust (sort of an “addition” of saturation by subtraction, if you will). I think this still falls under the “Golden Rule”, yes? No new color has been added, but I have been intentional about emphasizing some of the blues while de-emphasizing (almost to the point of monochrome) other areas of the scene.
I’ll read this more as a single image from a project than as a single submission to the main competition (or at least bias it towards that). I love photographs of glaciers, the complex structure of the break patterns as they flow over the ground, making them seem to heave like the skin of some giant creature. The amazing colour reveal like scales on a butterlys wings (echoing the ‘effect’ possibly).
The downside of most glacier pictures now is that they’re just so common. I think the Breiðamerkurjökull glacier and Vatnajökull glacier are probably more photographed than the grand canyon! This just seems to devalue the pictures in a lot of peoples eyes.
However, in the context of novel glaciers taken by a photographer with a proper understanding of them and an ability to tell a story about them - I don’t know anybody who is doing that and hence a project of that sort could have enormous artistic and interpretive value.
The image is strong on it’s own merits but with a story and within a project it could be stronger still. I was cheeky enough to have a look through your website and I’d love to feature you in On Landscape with some of your knowledge on glaciology if that would be possible.
Being critical of the picture, I would say that the desaturation is fine as you’ve not distorted things too much but the effect has left the background a little washed out or dull. I’d be tempted to lift the whites a bit. The other thing that is potentially distracting is that the top sweep of revealed glacier surface is cropped by just a tiny amount. I think it would be better to crop it more or not at all (the ‘touching’ is a distracting point in my opinion).
I hope that helps and please let me know if you’re interested in an article of some sort
Thank you @Tim_Parkin for your very kind and considered feedback. I begrudge no one for wanting to photograph glaciers as I think they are among the most beautiful things in the natural world, and certainly the accessibility of Iceland’s glaciers makes them an obvious target for other photographers. However, I certainly agree that glacier images are at risk of becoming cliché, and I think the kind of scene I’ve photographed here is a more stereotypical composition (as is Iceland’s ice caves in winter). But, yes, my intention is to use portray glaciers from a variety of perspectives that tells a story beyond just “oh, wow, that’s pretty”. Thanks very much for peeking at my new (and still rough around the edges!) website and considering this image as part of that larger project. I would certainly be thrilled to talk with you more about this project and my glacier research. Please reach out via PM whenever you would like!
As for your feedback on this image in particular, thank you again. I’ll definitely experiment with your suggestions, and yes, not that you have identified it, the trim across the top has become noticeably distracting tio me, too. At the very least, I’ll trim a bit more off the top to remove the “touch”. I have posted below an alternative composition that does better work with the snowfields atop the ice, though at the expense of losing the most chaotic part of the ice fall. Note that this one has only had minimal processing (like, 30 seconds in LR), but just from a composition standpoint, do you think this trade off is worth it? I think I’d need to trim more off the bottom of this composition to make it more vertically balanced.
Jeff, I’m grateful for your work to raise awareness. I’m reading Mensun Bound’s book about his discovery of Shackleton’s ship Endurance in the Antarctic. His statistics of global ice loss are very sad and sobering. Thanks for sharing this beautiful image.
