My in-laws live in a beautiful neighborhood in Pawley’s Island, South Carolina. It is filled with live oaks and crepe myrtles draped with Spanish moss. I took this image when we were visiting for Christmas.
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
The moss on the trees is constantly inspiring. My biggest problem is not just taking a million random pictures because everything looks pretty. I liked this image in particular because of the sense of movement and the relatively balanced placement of the moss and trees.
I had to crop the bottom of the image more than I would prefer because there was a stop sign. Does it feel too cut off? I’m also not sure about the right side of the image, especially the lower right corner. I would love to hear any thoughts on whether it’s interesting and how I could improve the image. Thank you for your time!
The curse of the pretty subject matter! The problem with pretty stuff is that people will always be drawn to it and hence your images have to work that much harder to stand out. The options are to be able to create a completely novel and amazing composition or to look at capturing the subject in a way that stands out, a new idea of light or interaction with subject.
This is a great example of the latter. The high contrast, rim lit mosses look amazing. The raw structure of the trunk and the brush like mosses. You mention the crop at the bottom, which I think is fine - perhaps you could crop slightly more off (I’m not convinced it will improve things though).
Given that the thing that stands out for me are the backlist sweeping movements of the moss, I might be tempted to crop more off the right hand side of the image, perhaps a 15% off the right side.
I would definitely put this image up for the next round in the competition because it has that movement you mention and novel textures. A very nicely seen and constructed image.
Thank you so much for your feedback and encouragement! I will also play with the crop on the right to see if I can get it a bit more focused on the most interesting parts.
