I am continuing with my motif of small scenes with slate. This one is much darker than the previous lichen image. I photographed this pile of rocks for 3 days with each day’s work being of a lower quality than the previous day. That’s how it usually works for me. I admire people who get increasingly more motivated with a subject. With me it’s love at first sight and then it starts to wear off. Yes, I believe that one of the keys to good images is to love your subject.
Let me know what you think of this one. I think a few items need to be cleaned up.
I like viewing your motif of small scenes and have enjoyed all of them. I particularly like this one. It has so much depth to it like the orange slate photo you posted a while back. I love the colors in this one and the streak of dark orange really pops. I don’t think you need to clean anything up. For me, all the little collections of different size slate add to the photo. After all, it was love at first sight, why change it!
What a tremendous capture Igor. I believe this is my favorite of your recent small rock scenes. I’m really liking the richness of tones on the left side of the image and I really like that diagonals on that side as well. The light is just perfect! There is one really white rock in the upper third of the frame on the left side near the edge. I would either clone that out or burn it substantially. It looks like a cigarette butt.
The jagged dagger in the middle of the scene has great presence. I wouldn’t clean anything up in that section and the colors look great. I’m wondering if you can pull just a little bit more of the green tones out of the bottom of the image? I agree with @joaoquintela about his suggestion for the right side. One last thing…You might add some contrast to the leading line coming out of the bottom right corner just to give that line more oomph. This is so good. One of my favorites of yours.
The cigarette butt is actually two small rocks laying perpendicular to one another. I darkened them rather than cloning them out. See above. It’s better but I don’t know if cloning them out would be the better solution. The problem is that now that you’re focused on it you get fixated on it and you can’t look at it as in the beginning.
I saturated the greens but it made virtually no difference until I was getting to the pixelation stage. I darkened some of the cracks at the bottom you and @joaoquintela pointed out but it’s not that noticeable unless you’re looking at it 100%.
Oh, I love the colors in this and all those diagonals. My first impression overall, though, was a feeling of imbalance. The frame is divided in half from the LLC to the URC by the line of the dagger and fractures. All the action is in the upper part, with the dagger, the bits of rock, the warm colors, and the overall darker tone. There’s not much going on in the lower half. So, to my eye, that 50-50 split with more visual weight in the top makes this unbalanced (top heavy).
I thought that darkening the lower half and bringing up a bit of the lights would give more balance - here’s my idea. Of course, if you want that feeling of imbalance, ignore all this.
Thank you for your work and effort, Bonnie. I have placed it up with the others for comparison. I like it very much and it actually comes close to my original idea of making the dagger stand out by emphasizing the difference in luminosity. However, now I’m not sure as some of the rich detail is being lost in the darkness, as well as the colors.
Thanks for tagging me Igor. Rather than discussing the expressive quality of the image, as it wasn’t loaded in the Critique Guest category, but I would like to discuss the quote from you above.
When you start with comparative language, you’re already on the Pete to suffering. I did this for years, looking at friends of mine who could spend 3, 4, 5 hours with single composition, making hundreds of variants and processing one of them for 10 hours.
That is not me, I usually make my best shots the second I see something that catches my eye; perhaps a little fine tuning to check sides of frames etc.
We all have “our way” to do things, and if that means seeing, shooting the perfect shot and then moving on, then great. Other people’s methods are rarely our methods. So, if I were you I’d go with the flow, shoot what engages you in that moment and then wander off to see what else the world has to offer. There are no prizes in landscape photography for time taken.
