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
What is your response to this?
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
When rocks fall and break they leave forms that challenge the imagination. I enjoy playing with these forms. This was shot near the Colorado River.
Technical Details
GFX50R, 45-100mm, f/11, focus stacked
Specific Feedback
Are you intrigued?
Critique Template
Use of the template is optional, but it can help spark ideas.
My response was first mystery, then danger. Danger, as in, “don’t go in there!” The darkness is the unknown - and you might not want to know what it is. There’s no scale, is this a place where one might reach there hand in, or a cave one could walk in to? We don’t know. Also, the perspective is unclear. Are we looking down, up, or straight across? A mystery.
As I look and study further, the forward rock, shape, could be seen as a guardian of whatever is in the darkness. An imaginitive stretch perhaps, but the main rock could be viewed as like a gargoyle again guarding something, preventing or discouraging entrance.
I’m just guessing that the b&w treatment was done to emphasize those things. I could be way off.
Hi Igor,
This definitely has an air of mystery and a sense of foreboding to it. Maybe that is why I can see that face in the shadows just above the point of the larger lighter toned rock. My first thought was that the rock needed to be lightened just a little, but now I am not so sure as that might destroy the mood. Nicely done.
A very interesting choice for a composition, Igor, one I think, that many would dismiss before even taking the picture. At first, I didn’t think it worked but I have come back a few times to view it some more, which tells me that this image deserves. more than a first impression. There is a great deal to explore and it does what I believe any successful photograph must, namely evoke a mood. I can’t quite say precisely what that mood is for me but I am certainly aware of a feeling of tension, uncertainty, and dis-ease. I would be tempted to bring up a little more darks contrast in the upper section - it feels a little flat back there and I would like to see just a little more.
This has a bit of an animate feel for me, as if a monster returning to its lair. The small points of light almost have the appearance of eye staring back from the deep, almost as if other creatures lurk in the deep.
