Please share your immediate response to the image before reading the photographer’s intent (obscured text below) or other comments. The photographer seeks a genuinely unbiased first impression.
Questions to guide your feedback
With this image, I would like to hear your honest initial reaction to this photo. Does it elicit any emotional response, does it pose any questions? What are your thoughts on the subject matter?
Other Information
Please leave your feedback before viewing the blurred information below, once you have replied, click to reveal the text and see if your assessment aligns with the photographer. Remember, this if for their benefit to learn what your unbiased reaction is.
Image Description
This image is part of a series of images I recently completed in a stretch of mangrove forest in Queensland, Australia. Through the series I was trying to explore the complex nature of mangroves, including the harsh conditions they grow in, their importance in protecting land from erosion and filtering pollutants. With each image I attempted to create some sort of emotional response that links to the overarching nature and condition of the mangroves. This image is one that I personally feel was most successful, although I would like to hear others’ thoughts on it as this is my first real attempt at producing images in a series.
With this image, the I was trying to create a sense of depth and intensity in regards to the extensive root networks of mangroves, as well as uncertainty or curiosity using the darker parts of the image, as mangrove forests house an incredible hidden diversity of fauna that is often invisible.
Technical Details
ISO 800
200mm
f/11
1/15 sec
Only minor global edits were made including a 4x5 crop, increasing contrast, highlights, shadows and decreasing the black slider.
To me, knowing this is a mangrove and the very small area of detail, it gives me the response of fading away as mangrove areas are losing area worldwide. It’s an ecosystem requiring conservation and I think this captures its fragility and the fact that they are disappearing.
The blurred text in the original poster’s description can be revealed by clicking on it at anytime, in other words, you don’t have to wait for your response to post before it’s revealed.
It can be a bit confusing.
It’s actually written in the “Other Information” section above the description.
It’s easy to overlook.
Please feel free to post your thoughts, other readers should refrain from reading your response until they form their own opinion, it’s kind of an honor system setup
Hi Daniel, thank you for the feedback! Your take on the image is very interesting and it certainly aligns with the sort of response I am trying to create with this image. I absolutely agree with you about the necessity of conserving mangroves, It is good to hear their fragility is conveyed through the image. Thanks again
I have not spent much time in areas with Mangroves, so without your title I would not have picked up on what it was. That being said, I’m taking this more as a dark abstract image with shapes that do make me ponder what it is. I know it’s mangroves from the title. Was it at night, is it macro or a larger view? Many of the same questions that other abstracts give you about what exactly you are looking at come to mind. It’s dark, and maybe a little foreboding. I enjoy the shapes emerging from the dark though, and it makes me wonder about what I am seeing.
I am not sure how I feel about the leaf near the top (I think that’s a leaf?). It doesn’t match the rest of the image, maybe that contrast is by design. It does add more questions about what I am seeing, and more mystery. However, being near the edge of the frame, it’s also a little distracting, and trying to pull me back out of the image. If it was near the middle, it would be a focal point of the image. If you are trying to highlight the dark shapes, that may not be a good thing. But my eye keeps going back there from the dark shapes.
I really like the artistic vision you have with this image, the minimalism, the shapes of the branches, and the gold leaf playing off the various shades of grey. I just wish that leaf were a quarter/third of the way down the frame rather than up at the very top!
Hi Bob, thank you for your feedback! The placement of the leaf was intentional to add more depth to the scene, although I see how it can be distracting and I possibly did not balance it with the rest of the scene as well as I should have. I may experiment with a black and white version of the image so that the bright orange is not as distracting.
Hi Jeff, thank you for the feedback! I think In hindsight the placement of the leaf was far from ideal and I don’t think there is much I can do to correct it in post, although it is definitely a lesson in composition
