When I went to Utah last year I expected to find this type of image and I did. This was captured in redder colors but I decided to make the reds a bit more yellowish and reduce the scream factor. I found this arrangement by the side of the road of my favorite canyon and kept coming back to it until I decided it was worth setting up the tripod for it. Hope you like it.
Ah yes! Now I remember what attracted me to this in the first place. It was those bar curved branches near the top. It seemed natural to include the yellow bush at the bottom so I enlarged the composition to include it.
Another Wow…perfectly balanced and composed Igor. Such an interesting image it takes time to appreciate all the areas of this. The yellow bush really anchors the image for me. THe serpetine branches against the red rock is very cool. I cannot wait to hit Utah.
Beautifully framed Igor, as Mario said that bush anchors the image and serves as a guide to the eye to go wonder on those twisting and compelling tree branches on the top.
I do like that you chanced the hue of those red to a more yellow one, it fits the overall palette of the image. The red may have created attention competition to the real interest, the tree and the branches.
This is very nice, Igor. While there is some busyness in the scene I think you organized the composition very well. I did notice some apparent motion blur on the right hand side of the yellow bush, but that is a minor nit.
@Igor_Doncov This is a very nice capture! I like your choice of subject and that you kept coming back until you thought that the conditions were right.
You have an excellent composition with the tree trunk balanced on the left golden ratio line. You also use all of the frame effectively with the yellow bush at the lower left, leading the viewer’s eye to the tree. Then up the tree to the branch reaching and stretching up and to the right top corner!
Two things I think you should try to see if it strengthens the image is to zoom out a bit. The tree doesn’t feel cramped in the frame but it might feel a little better with some more margin around the edges.
The second thing is that as I described how my eye travels through the scene, it also continues out of the frame as there is nothing there to block from the path it’s on. There might me a line in the rocks that if you changed your perspective and place it in that right top corner that could block my eye from traveling out.
Igor I agree that this is great image. Reflected light is my favorite thing about shooting in the desert, and how you processed it here (by tamping reds down) makes it even more beautiful. Regarding Michael’s comment. The pale yellow in the URC feels like it is leading out, and interestingly the dark lines in the ULC feel like they are leading down to the tree. In the URC, maybe clone away the yellow line, and darken that area, to keep the viewer’s eye from exiting the UR?
The trio of rocks in the open space is a detail I can appreciate. Oh sure the overall scene works tremendously well, but it’s the smaller aspects you’ve worked that make the totality. The striations on the rock face sort of echo this in a strange way. I really like the way the crack in the rock in the URC almost, but not quite, joins the tree branch.
A wonderful capture, so evocative of the vegetation in red rock country. I love the composition but had a feeling there was an overall color cast, so I pulled it into PS. There I noticed it does not have an embedded profile, which could make the colors display badly for some viewers, depending on their browser and monitor.
I did a quick color correction with Selective Color, pulling the midtone sliders a bit toward cyan, blue and green. That made the vegetation stand out a little better, to me, but desaturated the rock a bit so I added some red saturation. If some equivalent to this was done before you reduced the reds, they might not need further reduction.
If you’re familiar with Guy Tal, this is stylistically similar to some of his Utah images. I’m a fan of this intimate style of photography where everyday objects are well-composed into a frame that captures the spirit of the place without needing to rely on iconic rock formations that draw more attention from tourists and photographers. The red/green complementary colors creates a nice visual tension here.
Although I’ve never met Guy I have communicated with him a fair amount. We are different in that I don’t take liberties in post processing to the level he does. His writing, though, is first class.
You’re right, and that’s a problem. Fortunately I focus bracketed this image so there was an image where the flowers were not moving. I did a focus stack and came up with this.
