As many knows in wintertime in Iceland the sun is after 4pm gone, in this case the moon was full and the landscape turned into a mood of a sci-fi movie. This picture from barren snow landscape near the ring road turned in a moon landscape
Type of Critique Requested
Aesthetic: Feedback on the overall visual appeal of the image, including its color, lighting, cropping, and composition.
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
My main subject was to make this picture as spooky as possible in the given situation and time we spent in that place
Technical Details
Taken with Olympus E-M1 with M.Zuiko 12-40mm 2.8 Pro.
Aperture Value: 7,401
Colour Space: sRGB
Exposure Time: 2
FNumber: 13
Focal Length: 12
Focal Length In 35mm Film: 24
Photographic Sensitivity (ISO): 100
Lens Model: OLYMPUS M.12-40mm F2.8
On Tripod and edited in Adobe Lightroom.
At first glance this didn’t look spooky to me, but after reading that this was taken with only moonlight, suddenly it does look spooky.
Knowing the shooting conditions really helps to be able to interpret the mood you intended so thank you for that information
I bet it felt a lot more spooky being there in person, it’s tough to convey that feeling in any photograph but this comes as close as possible IMO.
I love seeing images from Iceland, they always bring a smile to my face.
I really like the composition with the seemingly low shooting angle and the subject matter is great!
I like the large mound in the FG, it feels like it’s in the right place and it is the right size in the frame IMO, and the amount of sky is great too.
Photographically, the only thing that stands out to me for improvement is that the horizon looks tilted slightly to the left, so maybe about 1 degree (or less) rotation to the right would make this perfect
I’ve worked under moonlight in Iceland before and I know how much fun it is and I get the ‘spooky’ reference!
The composition works for balance quite well. The mound is placed off centre to act in opposition to the light source. The sky is mostly featureless and hence plays a lesser part in the composition (You could probably lose more of the sky being as it isn’t contributing to the composition I think).
Compositionally, the picture is all about the shadows and mounfs and I think some of this works and some is distracting. The main distraction is probably the two shadows melding into a single diagonal line through the whole foreground. This is drawing lots of attention and, I think, is stopping your eye being able to wander around the frame. Obviously with the moon in this position it’s not possible to change but I think I’d be tempted to look around a bit more to play with those shadow positions and shapes and then come back to see if the shadow had moved a bit later.
As the picture is really about those mounds and shadows, I don’t think it’s as strong as it could be. The area to the bottom right of the mound is ‘empty’ in contrast to the very busy bottom left of the mound.
Once you’ve realised that it’s the shadows and mounds, I would have spent a bit more time looking around for compositions that are balanced and where those shadows and mounds work around each other rather than meld together.
In terms of post processing, I’d be tempted to reduce the contrast a bit and recover some of those blown highlights, just to retain some texture in them.
I hope you don’t mind me having a little play - I’ve used the clone tool to clean things up as a way of demonstrating how having clean edges to the frame can help. I’m not suggesting you use clone, but to do this in camera on location and look for compositions that have cleaner distributions of items. I also lowered the contrast slightly and purified the blue colour a little. I hope you don’t mind that!
Thank you for the constructive contribution from your side, there is always something to learn in the way of viewing and editing, no it is not annoying that you tweaked the photo a bit, I appreciate it very much, I will look at it with great attention the differences in editing.
Thank you very much for your share and time.
