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
Feel free to make any technical suggestions, but I’d love your overall impression as well.
Other Information
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Image Description
A friend and I were able to make it up to Rainier for a couple of nights last weekend. A knee issue kept me from getting out last winter, so it was a welcome relief to be back at it. I’m no bold adventurer, but it is such a different world in the Cascades in winter that it draws even a couch captain like me to sloth my way up there.
This was the view from about a stone’s throw from where we camped, taken a little after we arrived. It took way longer than it should have to get the camp set up, because much like my dog when he sees a squirrel I kept dropping everything and running over to take a picture as the conditions changed.
This was cropped from a horizontal format. The edges didn’t add much and I thought they detracted by minimizing that stream bed, thus the square crop. The only real color in the image was a dash of blue sky (the darker area in the upper right), so I elected to go with black and white. I felt the lack of color let me push the contrast a bit more, hoping to add to the depth of the image.
Technical Details
NIKON Z 7II
NIKKOR Z 24-200 f/4-6.3 VR at 24.0 mm
1/100 sec. at f/10.0 and ISO 64
Handheld
Specific Feedback
My hope was to give an impression of grandeur. Mt. Rainier is such a huge mountain, and I find it hard to capture that. If you shoot a wide angle, the mountain shrinks and doesn’t dominate like it does when you are there. If you zoom in, you miss the lower elevation that gives perspective. I find it an impossible task to capture just how massive it is, but nevertheless it is the white whale that I continue to seek.
