Dry Streams - Southeastern Colorado

Image Critiques Weekly Challenge
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Dry Streams- small.jpg
Dry Streams- small.jpg1500×750 820 KB

Critique Style Requested: Standard

The photographer is looking for generalized feedback about the aesthetic and technical qualities of their image.

Description

This is a diptych I made several years ago of aerial photos of two dry (maybe climate change-ravaged?) streams near where I live. The stream on the left and the area around it had been damaged by torrential rains that washed out a small bridge and I don’t remember what else. The stream itself is a perpetually dry creek called Sand Creek that usually only has water in it when there is a lot of rain. The light areas are where damage mitigation had taken place. The stream on the left is one that dried up due to the tamarisk growing all along it, and is what’s causing the watercourse to be so dark (they’re a water hog and will completely dry up a watercourse when left unchecked). Interestingly, the torrential rains that hit the other area did not reach this far, and in fact, they got no rain at all during that international-newsworthy series of downpours. The light-colored ground all around is dried vegetation due to the drought we’d been experiencing at the time. Fun fact: the round, dark areas are a few of the dozens of methane vents in the area. The largest ones, found about 30 miles from our home, are called Tepee Buttes.

Specific Feedback

I was especially intrigued by the similarity of the stream courses and the contrasting shapes in similar parts of each photo, as well as by the flipped tones. The photos were a happy accident that I found when I went through dozens of images I’d taken from the plane that day for a conservation flight. And no, I did not purposely put together the textures that seem to move from one image to its mate - again, that was a happy accident or maybe my eyes seeing something my conscious brain wasn’t registering at the time.

Technical Details

ISO 800, 1/1000, f 14, about 50 mm. Because the land had been so dry, the originals were sort of sepia colored, so I cropped square, converted to B/W and popped the contrast considerably.

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Denise, both views look very dry and include plenty of details. I find the detailed tangles of the stream on the right interesting and quite the change from the broad braided pattern of the stream on the left. Each of these views would stand alone nicely.