Critique Style Requested: Initial Reaction
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
Do you find the clouds or the mountains to be the subject?
Does the tension from the top of the mountain make you want to see more of it? Or does it turn you away?
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
Again the Tetons were hiding in plain site. Until this grand unveiling of…the Grand Teton. There never was a satisfactory complete vision of the Grand, so I had to settle for a partial exposure.
Technical Details
ISO 800 f/10 1/2000 at 55mm
Critique Template
Use of the template is optional, but it can help spark ideas.
- Vision and Purpose:
- Conceptual:
- Emotional Impact and Mood:
- Composition:
- Balance and Visual Weight:
- Depth and Dimension:
- Color:
- Lighting:
- Processing:
- Technical:
Connie - This is a very striking, dramatic picture! It must have been a great experience to watch this scene unfold. To answer your question about what I see as the subject—clouds or mountain—I feel like in some ways it’s hard to separate them in this image. The mountain is so tightly shrouded, that they are almost a unified subject, at least in the middle part of the image. That said, the brightness of some of the large clouds drew my eye at first, but I found the jagged ridges of the mountain to be the most interesting part of the image. So, if I may, I might pose the question to you: What do you want to be the subject of the image? As it is now, I think the clouds, and the sky more broadly, are very prominent, taking up about half of the image, but I think you could also make the mountains more prominent by experimenting with some tighter crops to remove a lot of the clouds and sky.
And to your other question, the image definitely makes me want to see more of the mountain, although I’m glad you caught this scene the way you did. Having the summit hidden in clouds makes it more compelling for me. Thanks for sharing this image!
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Great question John! You turned it back on me…lol. It was a trick question really. Because I wanted them to be a unified subject, but with the peak hidden, I wasn’t sure if I was getting the story across - the drama of the great unveiling…
Thank you for your thoughts, and I will play with the cropping idea! -Connie
I see this as being about the dramatic textures in both the mountains and the sky. You’ve got good coordination between the drama of both, along with interesting differences in textures, with the mountain (and trees) being quite sharp while the clouds show more smoothness. I don’t feel a need to see the top of Grand Teton.
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I feel this is such a powerful dramatic image of clouds and mountains, Connie. I like it as it is, with the peaks somewhat hidden in mystery behind those clouds. It is a story about their relationship to each other. If anything, I would have made this without the baseline trees, to make it strongly about clouds/mountain peaks; but with this image, perhaps a little more crop off the bottom would lessen the impact of ‘earth’ in the frame and keep our heads in the clouds - pun intended! Overall a very nice image, though.
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I really like this capture as is but I also think it might look nice cropped down to more emphasize the mountain in the center. Well done.
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No problem, Connie. I totally agree that the mountains and clouds act as a single subject. And even if the Grand was never fully revealed, the drama of the clearing clouds certainly comes across.
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