The photographer is looking for generalized feedback about the aesthetic and technical qualities of their image.
Description
Here’s an interesting plant. It’s called Ghost Flower or Indian Pipe. It’s a late summer bloomer and does not contain chrorophyl. Instead of making its food from sunlight, it has a parasitic releationship with fungus in the soil. I found this clump in Glacier National Park nicely backlit by a ray of late afternoon sunlight squeezing between a pair of Western Red Cedar Trees.
Specific Feedback
I had my eye out for some backlighting as we drove along the road in Glacier National Park. My wife spotted this area where multiple clusters were growing and miraculously, just as we were driving by the Avalanche Lake Trailhead, a spot opened up! Do you think the backlight through the trees is too bright and distracting, or does it work? I’ve lightened shadows in the foreground a bit because I love the duff and small branches. How does that look to you?
Technical Details
Nikon D850
Sigma 105 mm macro 2.8
ISO 64, f/3.3, 1/40
I stacked around 40 images ( I’m out of town without my computer!) in Helicon Focus to get this one. The backlighting caused a lot of artifacts around the brighter areas, so I worked around that in Lightroom to clone out those areas.
Critique Template
Use of the template is optional, but it can help spark ideas.
Hi Paul. I really like the backlight, but for me the green and blue in the background tries to pull my eye past the plant. It’s a beautiful arrangement of the Indian pipe.
Oh boy what a lovely bunch you found. They all appear to have been pollinated and are losing their petals. This in-between stage is fleeting and I think you’ve presented it well. Wish there was some separation between the tallest and the one next to it, but maybe that introduced something worse. The stage is nice since that’s how these beauties grow - in any available part of the forest floor where that fungal relationship exists. That shaft of light though…it does overwhelm and looks artificial to me. It’s difficult to tell how it was created from this shot, but a more subtle application or approach might be beneficial to keep our attention on those beautiful blooms. Oh and I like the bit of moss directly in front of them.
A great find, worth the processing trouble! For me, the brighter BG light is a little distracting compared to the lovely plants. Just for comparison, I wonder if it could be subdued just a bit without having to do any selecting, by using Selective Color to darken the greens, blues and yellows, which are probably not significant in the flowers.
@Diane_Miller@Kris_Smith@Dennis_Plank@Giuseppe_Guadagno Its tough for me to want to change that background light too much. The green is from Red Cedar branches and the blue is a river in the background. The darker sides are trunks of the trees. That said, I did soften the light a little bit and removed the crop thinking it might reveal more that it is trees. I tried to use warmer tones on another version that might actually have been truer to that evening light, but it looked too contrived. If it wasn’t on a fairly steep hill, I would have tried a longer focal length without stacking.
Understand completely how difficult it is to change what you found in the field and was so compelling to you. Being there and experiencing the scene is part of what makes this work for you. The revised version helps a bit, but it still feels artificial to me because I wasn’t standing next to you. The added context helps - maybe somewhere in between would be a good way to go.
If you can take the time, editing your original post to included subsequent edits helps us see and track changes easier because they load into the viewer together.
The third (bottom) one works for me – as a viewer I have no idea that the shaft of light or the dark areas really are, and the mystery adds immensely to the image. For me, the more ghostly the apparition the better!
@Dennis_Plank@Diane_Miller@Kris_Smith So, these ideas are growing on me! I ended up just resetting the whole thing and starting over, trying to keep a ghosty vibe going. its the 4th image from the top.
