Small Scene: Point Lobos State Natural Reserve, California

Image Critiques Weekly Challenge
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Image(s)

FGisin_NPN_1183_Natures_Geometry.jpg
FGisin_NPN_1183_Natures_Geometry.jpg1500×1000 1.84 MB

Image Description

It was one of those “this is as good as it gets, it does not get any better than this” moments. I must have spent more than a half hour just watching the incoming wave sweep up the cliff, followed by dozens and dozens of little rivulets flowing back down. Each repetition similar, but at the same time different.

It fondly reminded me of the time I accidentaly discovered (and immediately bought) Benoit Mandelbrot’s seminal book, “The Fractal Geometry of Nature” at my local Barnes and Noble book store back in the early 1980s.

To this day, I am still appreciative of the fact that “complexity” is not the same as “chaotic distractions and clutter” in a well-composed image.

Feedback Requests

[The scaled down version in this post does not do justice to the exquisite details in the original 8256 x 5504 px version. SIGH!]

I had to move down the Sand Hill trail about 100 feet in order to have the boundary between the vertical cliff and the surface of the Pacific ocean sweep across the image at a diagonal. I think doing so added a bit of polish to the overall dynamics of the image.

I tried cropping the top and bottom a bit. Turn it into more of a panorama. But no matter how much I futzed around with the top/bottom edges of the frame, it always lost something. I’m actually planning to include more of the surroundings when the conditions are also ideal the next time I’m down there.

I’m interested in your thoughts on my final crop. Too tight? Not tight enough? Just right?

Pertinent Technical Details

1/2000 sec at f/13, ISO 1000, 600 mm

I exposed for the highlights, which in turn resulted in too much color noise in the “underexposed” vertical wall in the background. Lightroom’s enhanced denoise did a good job of solving that problem.

Tried the new “Adaptive Profile” feature in the Lightroom Develop module, but it added too much contrast - blew out the highlights. So I switched back to the Adobe Neutral profile (my favorite starting point) and manually tweaked the pixels to my taste.

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Franz, without doing the measurements and calculations for proof, the water draining looks quite fractal. I also like the color and details in the ocean.

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Really nice freezing of the draining water to make the abstract. I can see where cropping could be challenging and I am attracted more to the rock with the rivulets rather than the wave.

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Normally, in an image like this I would want less structure in the water but this is remarkable how fractal this actually is. It’s really quite mesmerizing to look at all of the details. I know what you mean about loosing details when posting so small here and it can be quite a difference between the original and what we see but there is still enough detail to make this exceptional. I love the color of the water. As for the crop, Since I don’t really know what’s outside the edges of your frame its hard to tell if it’s currently too tight but the angle of the water and the angle of the horizontal line in the rock face are the same angle so I wish there was just a touch more to the rock so it mimicked the amount of real estate that the water takes up for slightly better balance but I also think it’s pretty darn good as is. I can imagine myself sitting in this spot and just watching the waves crash in over and over again while listening to the seals bark just around the corner. This is one of my favorite places on the planet. I just wish they would let you in for sunrise and sunset.