Here’s what I originally posted. If you download it and view it full screen in Photoshop with a dark gray background on a calibrated monitor in a dark room it should be close to what I was striving for :
The photographer is looking for generalized feedback about the aesthetic and technical qualities of their image.
Description
The title was stolen from the final paragraph of Adriana Claudia Sanz’s recent Learning with Experts article here on NPN. If you haven’t read that yet, I highly recommend it.
Specific Feedback
I wanted to strike a balance between the light from the rising sun and darker mysteries behind, a yin and yang if you will. I know this will change a lot depending on what lighting your viewing the photo in, but I’d love your thoughts if I pulled that off.
I purposefully cut off the rest of the foreground mound to try and connect the flow with the lines in the background. Does that work, or would you recommend a different idea?
Technical Details
NIKON Z 7II
NIKKOR Z 24-200 f/4-6.3 VR at 185 mm
1/80 sec. at f/6.3 and ISO 64
Critique Template
Use of the template is optional, but it can help spark ideas.
I know it’s hard to commend on cropping less without knowing the options, so here’s a quick and dirty edit of the bigger view I was shooting. (Once again, those deepest shadows are darker than what I’m seeing in Photoshop.)
This is wonderfully lit, John. I always struggle where to crop at Painted Hills. There is so much going on and I tend to go wide or really long and abstract. You have managed to do a splendid job with more middle range approach.
To my eyes, the foreground crop is perfect. You got the best colors and textures and none of the scrubby grasses. I also like how you cropped off the top, though I feel like I want more of that black band in the upper middle. I checked the full frame, and it’s not the overly lit hill, but the one where the black band stays in shadow. However, the adjacent hill might need some burning to avoid an eye-grabber there. Maybe it’s just me (I know the area, and I know that black band is wider than it is here), but it’s worth playing with. Or you could come down below it and crop there.
Really fabulous textures and colors, and I love the greens in the foreground. The feeling I get from it is a peaceful, fresh morning, and a kind of intimate view and private experience. I think the shadows make it really feel like a small slice of of time and place.
John, the yin/yang view here looks great. Using Firefox on a Mac, I don’t see any difference between your two posts as I switch back and forth. The “full landscape” view is interesting, but lacks the emotional drama of your actual post. The spring greens leading back to the rusty hills works with fine sweeping textures works very well.
So I came back to see what my big monitor shows and now I see the brightness difference along the edges in the dark regions. That’s a nice, subtle improvement.
IMO you pulled this off beautifully John. The slight raising of the shadows is subtle and looks to be about perfect for my tastes. I do like the interplay of light and shadow as well as the implied motion of the graceful lines of the painted hills. They first take the eye from left to right and then exit out the top left edge of the frame. The color palette is a nice mix of greens and reds as well as some earth tones. No suggestions from me.
Well the crop certainly brings a different view but I prefer the original, or maybe something in between. The crop works and is very unique, the colour and lightness on PS on my calibrated monitor looks good.
I also like the original very much. It somehow looks different from how this place is usually photographed. I’ve always found it difficult to process the lighter land at the base of these hills because it draws attention from them but you’ve worked it in quite well. Perhaps a bit less sky? I don’t know.
Thank you @Marylynne_Diggs@Mark_Seaver@Ed_Lowe@Mark_Seaver and @Igor_Doncov for the thoughts and suggestions! I always feel a bit challenged at icons like the Painted Hills; it’s not always easy for me to come up with something that is expressive and hasn’t been done many times before.
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