Stick Creature

I was trying to find a composition using the dam, tree and stick creature . It was in winter and the sunset has just set throwing an orange cast over everything. I wasn’t happy with what I was getting so I knocked the tripod during a 1sec exposure.

Specific Feedback Requested

Any and all

Technical Details

100iso, 70-200mm at 200mm, F11, 1sec.

1 Like

Hi David – I appreciate your experimental approach to this scene, along with the colors and obscuring of the subject matter a bit with the motion. My first reaction to the scene is that I think I would work to simplify it. The moment you moved your camera, this departed from reality. In such cases with my own work, I feel a bit more liberated in terms of clean-up, so I have suggested a few changes I might make with my edits below.

For example, I think I would crop out the heavy tree because it feels very dominant and isn’t balanced with anything else throughout the frame. I would also consider flipping the photo because I like the flow better in the flipped version. I also cleaned up a few of the brightest spots (the yellow trees are among the brightest and most colorful things in the frame so they might attract more attention than they deserve). I also think the strong angular lines coming out of the tree take away from the more flowing lines in the rest of the scene, so I cloned them out. I also desaturated the colors some. I should have also darkened the lower right corner since it catches my eye as is since it is so bright.

Since you titled the photo with the stick creature included in the name, I understand that it is an important part of the photo for you. With it blurred a bit though, I think it might be more of a distraction. In sharp focus, it might be an interesting focal point but here, I think it might be too hard to decipher what it is we are viewing. I added a some more blur and I think I like it a bit better because it is visually softer. I hope you find these suggestions helpful.