The photographer is looking for generalized feedback about the aesthetic and technical qualities of their image.
Description
This is one of the few leafed trees in Central Baja. They are everywhere and in different forms. Their shapes change with the amount of wind and dryness of their whereabouts. This has been a particularly wet year. I shot this near a dirt road used by the Baja 1000 racers. I expected one of them to come out roaring at any minute but only 3 cyclists came by in 2 days. Nonetheless, they were annoying.
Specific Feedback
This is a very ordinary image but for some reason I don’t find it ordinary at all. I’m wondering if that’s just in my head. What do you think?
This is proof that not every image has to feature a pretty sunset or a wide open landscape.
It’s a very quiet image. There’s no bells or whistles going off. It’s just simple. I think this would work even better if you had a series of images similar to this.
This might sound a bit strange, but I think it is about the sun and its importance. Everything, especially the wonderful tree, points (stretches-great title, by the way) toward the light. While it may seem to be an “ordinary” image, it is not.
My first impression is just how large/massive the trunk is compared the to the few branches. It feels solid. Sure of its self and position in the landscape. Demanding attention. Well, the tree definitely got me to look several times. Nicely seen and captured, Igor.
I agree that the sunlight is a big factor here. Just to show you, here is the image I was really after. The tree was an afterthought. This image had dabs of sunlight as well but after I got all set up the sunlight was gone. Nonetheless I diligently shot several exposures of this composition. But no matter how I processed it I could never duplicate the magic of real sunlight. BTW, what also attracted me to the tree image was how the camera rendered the sky. I personally prefer the tree image over this one even though this is a superior composition.
That cracked me up. One of these days I want to bicycle tour the length of Baja; I’ll have to be sure to steer well clear.
Interesting. That sky just feels too green to my eye. (The area without clouds is about -10 in the a channel of lab.) Maybe that’s why although I’m really enjoying both, that second image really sings for me. I love that tree, it has great character, but the combination of elements in that second image is pretty darn good.
This was shot just a few minutes before sunset. Do you think the warm light could have given the blue sky the appearance of being slightly green? This was shot with daylight white balance and not really changed. I used the Eterna profile for the low contrast but I don’t believe that changed the hues other than making them less saturated.
I’m not knowledgeable enough to know if the late light was part of the story. I would assume later light would move warmer, not cooler, but that’s only an assumption. I’m unfamiliar with Eterna, so I can’t comment on that.
I really like Dan Margulis’s book on working in the lab colorspace, and he notes that “Ordinarily (skies are) found slightly to the green side of blue, so slightly negative A and strongly negative B. However, some skies tend toward purple and in these cases the A can be slightly positive. If the A and B are negative and equal, the sky is to green.” In your image the sky is about twice as blue as it is green, so maybe that’s actually correct. However, the green shift seems stronger than I would expect for that lighting.
Here’s a quick and dirty example of what it looks like if I shift the sky from -10 to -4 in the a channel. My preference is for the warmer sky, but as always it’s what you as the photographer prefer; if you like how the camera rendered the sky I say run with it.
I added your version to the original post for comparison. I honestly prefer the original sky. I think it’s because the colors are more consistent in hue. That is, there is an overall warm feeling about the scene which the cooler blue disrupgs a bit. But in truth I have all my life had a greater affinity for cyn blue over pure blue. So maybe that plays into it. My battery is dying… When it’s recharged I will post another image where a true blue is alongside very warm colors to see the effect more clearly.
Here is an image I made the following morning at a different location. You can see that the morning sky is different than the evening sky this far south. Well, actually, this was nowhere near sunrise. But the clash between the blues and the reds is very evident. It’s a different appeal. I prefer harmonious colors than opposing ones, generally. I recently watched a video on this which made sense to me. It stated that when you have complementary colors we prefer to have one dominate and the other be here and there. The second should be accents. If both exist in similar amounts we find it overwhelmingly arousing. I’m now thinking of how many flags consist of red, white, and blue. The second image shows this idea. It’s basically a cool image with accents of warmth. Perhaps more importantly, the warm shapes are interspersed within the blue rather than all blue and all warm areas. All shot within a days of each other.
Just to clarify, I didn’t adjust the blue at all. For cool colors vs. warm colors, I’m using the definition that blue and green are cool, and that magenta and yellow are warm. By that definition, my blues are warmer than the original, because the sky is more magenta and less green.
Thank you for all your comments and suggestions. I stopped once again and looked at this tree and it did nothing for me this time. There were no clouds and the light was considerably harsher. It’s amazing how just a slight amount of high clouds can affect light so much. Fact is, the picture looks better than what I saw this time. Is life the same?
I forgot about this image. I saw it a week or so ago, was going to comment, got distracted, and well, you know, things happen.
I was scrolling today and came back across this. This tree looks like a sun worshipper to me. The light coming in from the left with the tree raising all of it’s branches toward the light gives me this impression. Like it’s hugging the sun.
I love that the heavy boulders in the foreground are in shadow or I think they would completely overwhelm the scene but as it stands, the low angle light in the sky certainly helps this image a lot. What I really like about the image though is the the heaviness of the foreground boulders and the heaviness of the trunk of the tree. They are both very masculine and stout. I’m not sure if you get that feeling or not but that’s what I immediately see in this. Oh, and I prefer the original sky although I could see something in between the original and John’s version.
@linda_mellor, @David_Haynes thank you for your comments on this. I wasn’t sure how people would react to it because it seems so ordinary. I guess I saw something lyrical in that tree and it’s posture.
