The photographer is looking for generalized feedback about the aesthetic and technical qualities of their image.
Description
I am not a flower guy. So when they told us that our third shoot was going to be one of a carpet of flowers I was not excited. And when they suggested we should use the wind to our advantage and shoot blurry flowers my spirits dropped even lower. When we got there I wondered aimlessly for the whole time and was ready to pack up without a shot. I agreed that the yellow flowers were striking and uplifting but I could see doing anything that hadn’t been done better by others in the past. But when the sun dropped to the rim of the mountains behind and I saw the shadows cross the entire field I felt it again. The flowers were blowing wildly so I jacked up the ISO and shot at 1/250th of a second hoping to freeze it all. It worked.
The image looks cliche in my opinion. It contains the most common message of all landscape images - ‘look how beautiful I am. Don’t you wish you were here? ‘
Specific Feedback
I raised the luminosity and boosted the saturation of the yellows in the flowers to make them stand out. I also used a radial gradient filter to raise interest in the center of the shadowed area.
It looks very natural to me. I especially like the pastel colors in the mountains and in the sky with the soft clouds. I think you came away with a very pleasant wildflower scene that really captures the essence of a desert bloom.
Igor, I really like the pastel understate tones and colors in the mountains. Makes for a unique and effective Death Valley image. The flowers are also a treat. The detail and color in the foreground flowers along with the flowers that jut out like a T set the image up nicely and provide visual flow. Also, the saturated flowers work well with the muted background.
Very nice, Igor! I love the contrast between the contrasty foreground and the more muted background. This creates a very pleasing and natural look and feel and the image just emanates calm and peace. I find looking at it very relaxing!
You should be uninterested more often…that’s a lovely shot!
What I like is not so much the flowers themselves but the contrast between them and the background mountains, both the starkness of the mountains vs the flowers, and the totally different colour palette.
The ground at the very front of the image is a bit scrappy but I suspect that a tighter crop would detract from what you’ve done here.
Igor,
Nothing wrong with ‘look how beautiful I am. Don’t you wish you were here?’ The light on the BG mountains is quite lovely and the pastel colors contrast nicely with the vivid yellows of the wildflowers. Everything looks very natural to me.
I think what happened is that I signed up with Michael Gordon and Chuck Kimmerle because of the type of work that they did and which I admired. As a result I was prepared to make images in their ‘genre’. I was not prepared to shoot flowers nor take this sort of image. But I like how it turned out, or I wouldn’t be posting it.
I think this is an excellent image. The shadow play on the lower portion of the mountain backdrop and the warm fading light is what makes this one sing for me. I also love the color of the sky which has some aqua in it, at least the right portion of the sky does. As far as being cliche, I feel like almost every image I see these days is in some way or another, cliche. Even abstracts, ICM, and mud cracks all seem cliche to me these days but that doesn’t mean I don’t want to shoot them. I’m glad you took this image because I think this sets the bar pretty high and I’ve seen few Death Valley images that are this good with flowers. You’ve combined the Panamints with snow, a good sky, lovely shadows and fading light with a foreground that only happens once every few years. The composition and the colors are excellent. I’d be pretty happy with this one, cliche or not. Really liking this one, Igor!
I admire you soldiering on, despite the oppressive conditions. I sometimes wonder if it is good to take occasionally take images that resonate more with others than they do with me, in the hopes of improving the images that do resonate with me. I should probably do more of that myself…
Making a likable image is for me much harder than making a ‘profound’ image. The worst of it is that you don’t fully understand it’s profoundness until you get home and study it.
