cgardner
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 p.1 #3 · Long exposure color work. | |
Like sky and clouds because they are unusual and the rendering of the house. The main center of interest for me here is the house, the secondary one the sky but the crop puts more emphasis on the sky. With the trees on left, house on right and brightest part of the sky in the gap in the middle pulls my attention to the middle then up into the brighetr part of the clouds and out of the top of the photo. There's no compelling contrast to pull my eye back to look at the main focal point.
Eye motion studies of human perception have found that the eyes move in a series of saccades and fixation across the visual field looking for familiar content to figure out what is in the photo and what in the photo is most important. When there is a face in a photo the eye will tend to scan to the top of the photo first because that's where faces normally are, above the body. With a landscape in person we scan from foreground to background and expect the more interesting content to be in the foreground. All those factors would predict the house as being the content the viewer will likely scan over to and fixate on initially. Then compositionally the challenge is predicting where their eye is likely to wander next and whether or not it will be tempted to return to the focal point already seen first.
What I do when shooting or editing / critiquing a photo is crop "inside-out". I identify the focal point, crop in tight on it, then slowly expand the frame adding additional content and asking myself whether it adds to the interest and implied message or distracts.
Here I started with isolating the main focal point, the house...
Then expanded to add the secondary focal point the neat sky...
But I cropped out the trees on the left to eliminate the sideways ping-pong between trees and house along the horizon and the "light at the end of the tunnel" of the gap between them in your original.
Another alternate crop that appeal to my eye more was this one which includes part of the trees on the left but subordinates them by making the amount shown and contrast created less compelling. In your original the visual "mass" of trees and house balance each other more or less equal but opposite.. Reducing the the mass of the trees "tilts" the balance towards the house.
I toned down the sky to make it contrast and attract less attention. The amount of attention the house gets and the likelihood of the viewer returning for a second look at it can be modulated via how much it contrasts with everything else in the photo.
They are all the same story, just edited and interpreted differently to alter the relative importance of the elements it it. FWIW - Had I taken the shot I would have composed it differently at capture without the distracting gap in the middle these crops try to work around by moving the POV of the camera left so the house was seen more in front of the tree line, eliminating the gap with parallax.
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