The photographer is looking for generalized feedback about the aesthetic and technical qualities of their image.
Description
This is yet another image of closeup examination of redwood trees that have been partially burned. The idea was too contrast the burnt interior with the still living exterior bark. However, this image is really not about the story of burnt trees. In fact, it’s not about trees at all. It’s about colors and shapes and tonal values and textures.
Specific Feedback
The composition is a bit unorthodox. I was initially concerned about the empty space in the upper right and the layout of shapes in general. However, as I came back to it repeatedly it stopped bothering me. I guess I’m trying to convince myself that being a slave to standard composition is not a good thing. What do you think?
This does have a pleasing combination of colors, tones, shapes, and textures. The upper right doesn’t feel empty to me because of the lovely textures. I think the relative sizes of the warm vs. cool shapes is good - it feels balanced to me.
I’ve decided to radically change this image. The bright areas in the upper left had bothered me from the start and cloning them out has not been the solution. So, I’m doing a major crop.
The second issue has to do with brightness. When I processed this printing it was too dark as expected. However, when I raised the exposure I decided that the overall look should be brighter. I keep falling into the trap of making images look like the eye sees them. Here the subject matter is pretty unimportant and I’ve decided to work on how the image looks as a whole. So here is a brighter version and I may not be done messing with it. Let me know if you think I’m on the right track.
Igor,
I have come back to this image a couple of times. I really liked your vision here, but there was something bugging me and I couldn’t quite figure out what it was. After seeing your revision I think you have pretty much nailed it; so I would say that you are on the right track. I think the image is about the trees, but it is also about the shapes, colors and lovely intimate details of those burnt trees. The large version is a real treat and a must see to really enjoy those details. This is very engaging image IMO.
I looked at this earlier and couldn’t figure out how I felt about it. I think I now like the crop – I love the trunk in the right 2/3 and think it stands out better in the lightened version. But I wonder about the wisdom of brightening up the left 1/3 – I’d be tempted to leave it as it was – there was a nice mystery to it. Or I could do without it entirely and just have the darker trunk on the right. I do long to see a little more on the bottom but assume there was something there that dictated where the frame fell. With just that trunk, I could go back to the taller original crop.
Very nice, especially the new version! The crop works really well and I love the almost iridescent greens in the burnt. It almost looks like a peacock feather.
Another lovely Redwood burnt bark image, Igor. This really is about textures, and colors but I also love that it’s park of the bark of a redwood. A couple of things stand out to me. In the original I would have toned down the brightest spots of those knots in the UL and slightly dodged the darker right side of the image but just a little bit. For the cropped version I would burn the left side back almost to the original as @Diane_Miller recommends.
Lastly, Because the left side pulls my eye quite a bit I would also crop the left side of the image off as @Diane_Miller recommends. Something like this:
Thank you for your suggestions but the pure charcoal versions really don’t work for me. I still think the problem with the initial version is with the two bright areas. Here is still another version with the bright areas replaced rather than burned in. They had already been burned in.
This one requires a different point of view than in the past. @Diane_Miller@David_Haynes This of wood as a flamboyant medium rather than a mysterious one.
I’ve been following this and I have an attraction to the original vertical, I was thinking that it just needed to be a bit brighter overall but darken the spots on the upper left.
Your latest iteration (the one posted after David Haynes’s comment) hits the mark for me.
I agree that this is about shapes, tones, textures and colors but for me, I can’t separate those from the fact that it’s a tree and that it has been charred by fire.
It’s dominating features are the shapes and textures, etc. but they are an integrated part of the tree.
Me being more of a literal type of person, I need a story, I need something that makes sense to me and that means that I can’t ignore the tree or the the burn event and that’s probably why I’m not any good at making abstracts, I enjoy viewing them and I even have fun making up my own interpretations but it’s hard for me to connect with abstracts in a meaningful way. Different strokes for different folks, right
The way I see this image, Mervin, is similar to what photographers have done with the trees in the White Mountains near Lone Pine. The weathered wood is used to create abstract or semiabstract compositions. I, personally, rarely make purely abstract images. They are usually an abstraction of the subject but the subject is recognizable. Think of O’Keefe rather than Kandinsky. I enjoy her work more than his.
Here is a work that’s even more abstract and even more difficult for viewers to relate to. I enjoy this type of work but know it’s limitations for public appeal. Perhaps there will come a time when I will post this type of work as well.
Sorry for the late response, Igor, I’ve been away for a couple of days.
I really like the tightly composed image of just the bark posted in comment #14. It does have a nice semi-abstract feel to it but as you say; it’s still recognizable which means that it’s connected to a real part of nature that I feel I can physically touch.
Full on unrecognizable abstracts are more like a dream and not touchable.
I often place priority on shapes, colors, textures, tones, light, etc., it seems that those attributes are a large part of why I love nature so much, nature has a way of presenting itself as art, all I have to do is figure out which parts of it appeal to me the most and capture it with my camera.
Nature is the artist, I’m just doing my best to document it in a way that does it justice… and maybe sometimes enhance it in some minor but meaningful way.
I’ve viewed the artwork of O’Keefe and Kandinsky before but it’s not my favorite kind of art, personally, I like yours much better!!
Yes. That’s the challenge isn’t it? Easier said than done.
This leads us to Plato and his primal forms. He believed that abstract forms were perfection and nature should not be imitated in its raw existence. Anyway, it’s a big subject but worth exploring to understand how we got to where we are.
What are your favorite painters? Or I should WHO are your favorites?
Probably not what you might expect from a guy that hangs out on a nature photography site so much but… Norman Rockwell and Thomas Kinkade.
Norman Rockwell hits the mark for my love of vintage 1950s people and inanimate object art and Thomas Kinkade for my love of nature mixed with manmade objects including houses, barns, bridges, wagons, fences, etc… I love that ethereal look in paintings but not so much in photographic images.
I read somewhere that 60-70 percent of Americans list Rockwell as their favorite painter. I think that if Rockwell were a photographer he’d be a photojournalist.
Don’t know much about Kincaid but from what I’ve seen his work is pretty formulaic. The kind of guy that paints a mill with the waterwheel by the stream.
I met Thomas Kinkade in 2006, he knew an artist in NC who is a friend of mine, it was after a local art show. I already liked his work before I met him and it was a brief encounter of no more than a couple of hours but he did reveal to us that he was market driven, he didn’t always paint what he wanted to paint, he painted what he knew would sell to the masses.
Sort of sad that it was business driven rather than from the heart, other artists heavily criticized him for it but he did have a private collection that never saw the light of day according my friend.
My friend said later, after Kinkade died that he was pretty happy about painting a cover for a race program for a well known race track (Indianapolis Speedway maybe? and the Yankee Stadium when full of people).
Maybe he enjoyed the wealth more than being free to paint whatever he wanted?
Sadly, he was addicted to booze and valium, that’s a bad combination and he died in 2012 or 2013 (if I remember right) at age 55 or so from an overdose of both.
I don’t have any prints from either artist and I don’t know much about their stories other than what I mentioned above, I just enjoy that type of art.
