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
I love seeing through the lens and the different layers I can create. This image was taken in the middle of the day on a somewhat overcast day.
Hi Martha,
What a lovely image! The soft yellow/gray/white palette is so pleasing and inviting. And putting the focus on the trees with the leaves closest to us softened gives me a feeling of peeking through… there’s an intriguing depth that choice provides. Woodland scenes are also challenging, and your choice adds some artistically rendered separation in the complexity.
My curiosity is wanting to see more of the scene; is this cropped? How much more is there? One reason I ask (besides just wanting more of that wonderfully light airy feeling) is because as is, there are two out-of-focus leaf areas that feel heavier and draw my attention. If there was more to the scene, they might be more balanced/less noticeable. My eye gets pulled between the left edge just below halfway down, and the more solid yellow spot directly across close to the right edge. With the delicacy of the rest of the image, those two denser areas stand out to me. For your consideration!
I love your use of focus here Martha, but with a slightly different direction than @Beth_Buelow . My favorite part of the image is the way those trunks stand out, and and viewing large it looks like the closest trunk doesn’t have quite the sharpness that the others do. A slightly different focus point, or a blended image, to get all those trunks tack sharp would put the icing on the cake of your effect here. In addition, the lack of OOF leaves in the ULC stands out to me, and if you could have found a window that had some blurry leaves there too I think the symmetry would be nice.
That’s nitpicking though and this is a wonderful image, especially for being shot in the middle of the day when light is more challenging.
Thank you @Beth_Buelow and @John_Williams I purposely focused in the back and made the leaves close to me out of focus. I like that look of looking through. It is def not focus stacked I need to look at the raw file but yes, trunks all focused would have been great now that I think about it.
Oh, and it is slightly cropped. I think I cropped the left side which was feeling heavy.
Martha, I love images with the foreground blurred/out of focus like this. Years ago I was scolded for a flower scene that was framed by out of focus flowers in front. I was told that out of focus only belonged behind the subject…I asked why does that have to be? Your image is a perfect example of how it can work so well to help frame/shape the subject of the image. A wonderful scene and terrific image, Martha.
Thanks very much for the submission! My first reaction from this is how well you’ve handled the composition. Those out of focus leaves work wonderfully well, balanced across from the bottom left group which blends into the ‘infocus’ leaves middle bottom and then the patch at the top right.
I immediately thought that the leaves looked a little green yellow (a little too cool) and so I had a play with the colour temperature. I didn’t want to warm the whole scene and lose the cool trunks so I had a little play with the green tones and moved the hue slightly warmer.
Then I was wondering if the trunks could be a little brighter to go with the high key feeling in general… I tried this but it didn’t work and I realised it was actually the light leaves against the dark trunks that was way the picture ‘worked’.
I did think that there may be a little asymmetry, with a larger gap of ‘no trunks’ on the left so I played with a crop where I also tried to crop into the main areas of that swirling layout of out of focus leaves.
This was as far as I got trying to get to the ‘essence’ of what I saw as the main interesting features of the photograph.
Overall I think you’re onto a real winner here and although we get a lot of images that follow similar ‘aspen’ themes, this has enough originality in it to progress well I think.
As a final note, I think you could probably get away with saturating it a bit more if you felt that was something you’d like.
I need to look at the raw file but yes, trunks all focused would have been great now that I think about it.
