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
I would like to know your opinion about the interplay of the diverse structures and layers.
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
This is an image from a hike in Vienna Woods in Austria on Easter Sunday. The overcast weather conditions were in favor of showing the structures of the trees and delicate foliage in my opinion.
Technical Details
Panasonic Lumix DMC-GH3 with Olympus Zuiko Digital ED 50-200mm 2.8-3.5 @ 200mm, f/9, 1.3 sec, ISO 125, tripod, polarizer
I think that this is beautiful and also very interesting. I love the bright white tree trunks and all of the lines that they form and I really like the fact the the trees in the background have black/dark tree trunks while ones of the foreground trees are white. I also feel that the image is nicely balanced with the greens of the leaves being in the general center of the image and that my eyes aren’t being pulled towards anything undesirable. Overall, a really wonderful image!
This scene has a wonderful delicate mood to it that I find very inviting, Peter. The new spring growth is one of my favorite times to photograph the trees as the leaves are colorful and they are not fully out so the shapes of the trees are not hidden and are revealed to the viewer. This also has some nice depth to it with the lighter birch trees up front and some darker trees in the back. Beautifully done , no suggestions from me.
My initial reaction is the almost whimsical nature of the white birch bark interplaying with the darker, almost colorless ULC of the image. Those birch branches in the LLC are all leaning left drawing attention to those darker tree structures in the ULC. There is also the birch trees on the left that don’t have the color that those center birch trees have which plays well to your theme of diverse structures and layers. This is wonderfully understated in color tones and contrast.
There my be potential for a couple of different crops with this image if you played with it.
First impressions before reading your introduction … the image conveys layers of emerging foliage in a rainy day … just the kind of day yesterday, when I decided not to go out in the light rain to catch the same subject. Hopefully tomorrow. The even lighting obscured the feeling of depth among the layer of bare aspens, emerging foliage on the tree behind it, and the reddish vegetation on the hillside; maybe that lack of depth was an illusion that you wanted to generate. I wondered if the strong pair of trees on the right fit with the harmony of the rest of the scene, as my eye wanted to go to them from other parts of the scene.
OK, now I read your question … I tried my hand at playing with this. But first, I would like to call everyone’s attention to a free video out in the last week by Sarah Marino about photographing emerging tree foliage “https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bcrRndv0ZbQ”
I tend to be a bit un-subtle, so my result might lose too much of the nuance of your original, but here it is. I increased saturation of red, yellow, and added brightness to the white stems. A vignette seemed to soften the effect of the two trees on the right. (Those 2 might be a photo by themselves)
