Revised Version
Revision 1 (latest)
Added after receiving feedback from the community.
Original Version
Reposted the image 2000 X xxxx
Personally, Mark, I wouldn’t worry too much about the horizon line. I remember reading an interview with the truly remarkable photographer, Keith Carter, where he said that when he is composing a picture he often deliberately skews it a bit off level just to add tension and a sense of disorientation to the image. Of course, the important thing with Carter is that it is intentional.
As to this image, my issue is that though I can see what it is a picture of, I don’t know what it is about. It feels like there is something in this scene that has caught your attention but you haven’t made that clear to me. Is it, for example, the juxtaposition between the white capped waves and the perfectly still pond. Or maybe it is something about the man-made and the natural world. But I feel like you’ve presented a lot of information and it is left to me to organize it into something meaningful.
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Thanks Kerry.
Skew comments noted but it still feels weird to me. Thinking back to the shot I’m high above the pool, shooting down at an angle to the beach which itself is curving away to the south so I suspect it was always going to look a bit off.
Re your question of the “what”…“solitude” I suppose. Here’s a bloke doing laps in a ocean pool, all by himself in a beautiful spot.
The single person in that pool alongside all of what is going beyond is a good story and worth telling. But if you hadn’t told me there was someone in that pool, well, I couldn’t recognize that that dot in the picture was a person. In fact, I thought this was some kind of tailing pond or something. But if what you want the reader to experience is that single person alone in the pool which is itself dwarfed by the untamed ocean I think you’d want to find a different perspective from which to compose the shot.
No, it does not. The waves appear to be breaking uphill. I get that the beach is curved and so you’re going to have some areas appearing not level but the water coming into shore appears to be going uphill. I would rotate this clockwise. And, because you have relatively flat terrain, it just looks a bit odd at first glance. Also, because the file is so small, I can’t tell that there is a person swimming in the pool. I generally post about 2000 on the long edge of an image so that it can be blown up for the viewers to see details better.
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Mark,
It does not look level. However, I downloaded the image and measured its orientation by the vertical posts in the handrail by the stairs and by the guardrail at the end of the pool. The verticals are at 90 degrees, so the image does appear to be level, but visually it does not appear level. The waves do appear to be breaking “uphill” Very weird.
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The original poster added a revised version of their image.
The original poster added a revised version of their image.
The original poster added a revised version of their image.
Where is the original version? It’s hard to see the changes without it.
Looks like you got some useful feedback here, Mark. I keep looking at this and thinking, “The point of the photograph is too small in the frame.” As a coastal landscape image, there is too much that’s not natural. As a portrait of a swimmer, he’s too small in the frame. This is a fantastic location, and I don’t know what your options are for returning, but to me, we are all looking at the leveling issue when, really, the horizon doesn’t need to be in the frame at all.
I don’t know whether this completely eliminates what you were hoping to capture (a swimmer in a small pool in a big sea) or whether it helps to dial in your intent, but I’m offering a very different crop as something to think about. Of course, I might have eliminated your favorite part, in which case, please ignore this completely.
Here is the crop, a 2:1 pano focusing on the swimmer and the pool. We still get a sense of the larger contexts, but its details don’t distract us.
Glad to see you posting again. Looking forward to more of your work.
ML
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Thanks Marylynne. Your crop certainly works.