Critique Style Requested: Standard
The photographer is looking for generalized feedback about the aesthetic and technical qualities of their image.
Another image from my recent trip to Joshua Tree National Park. This was when the last over the evening light was directly hitting these rocks.
400 mm telephoto shot.
Lovely light and very pleasing mix of warm and cool! For me, a quick screen scroll reveals more interest in the lower 2/3 of the frame. The large brownish rock in the top center pulls my eye, as does the vein in it.
Hello Dean. I like first that you saw the light, no pun intended, and went to work to capture it. That said, I think there is too much going on in the scene; the upper background rock with light on it pulls the eye back away from the core of the image; A tighter crop or a closer step with that 400mm would reframe this and make it visually stronger. The light also doesn’t appear very warm for ‘last light’; perhaps working with the color mixer in Lightroom, where you can warm the sunlit parts a bit more, might provide an answer, as it would leave the blue shadows alone and provide a nice color contrast. I took the liberty of downloading and cropping it for reference. It’s a rough crop, and I shifted it to right to eliminate a little of the ‘seams’ in LL.
Hi Dean,
The light in this image is quite nice and adds some wonderful details and textures to these beautifully shaped rocks. This also has a nice sense of depth due to the repeating shapes of the rocks. My only suggestion would be a little crop from the top to minimize the brighter rock with the vein as well as a little from the left. I hope you do not mind, but here is what I was thinking. I really like this.
Thank you, @Diane_Miller, @brenda_tharp, and @Ed_Lowe. I’ll play around with this some more with your suggestions in mind.
I agree with the comments all have made. The light on the lower rocks is about as good as it gets but they need a good supporting dark bg to make them sing. @Ed_Lowe’s crop seems about right to me.
I think you mostly nailed what you were setting out to capture for this image but the little triangle in the top left portion of the image really pulls my eye. With that said, I very much like the crop that @brenda_tharp applied to your image as well as the subtle warmth that was added. It tames the relative chaos of the scene and the lines are purposeful. You could even remove just a smidge off the left side to crop out the line coming in from the upper left side of the image if that makes sense. I love that you are using the 400mm lens to capture landscape intimates. My 100-400mm lens is my favorite landscape lens.
Oh, I like this Dean. I think @Igor_Doncov’s got something there; here’s a rough version that tries to do that with processing.
