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p.1 #7 · p.1 #7 · Working on improving my surf photography. Critiques welcome. | |
eeneryma wrote:
I agree with Dave that this scene has potential but given the way it was shot it's problematic from a conceptual standpoint. The bright and out of focus foreground boardwalk attracts my eye first, pulling my attention away from the sea and the surfer which are the essence of the image. Second, the surfer is so small in relationship to the sea and mostly hidden under the wave that it appears to play a very subsidiary role. Like Dave suggested, I would rethink your message and get down on the beach and rephotograph, perhaps getting your telephoto lens closer to make the surfer much larger and more important in the scene. Working with what we have though, this is one possibility for your consideration.
Steve...Show more →
The surfer does play a subsidiary role. He is not the essence of the image, nor is the sea without the context of the foreground. The essence of the image is the approachability of the wave - that it offers a quick, user-friendly wedge/tube twenty feet off the beach, to the point where it's almost background noise to a coastal dweller sitting on his deck in the morning.
If you cut the deck, you kill that link. That wave could be a ten-second paddle and single duckdive out, or it could be an offshore river bar requiring a shitty, sharky paddle through ripping currents. No context, no story.
Surfers do not look at an image like that and care about the surfer. That's a run of the mill backside barrel on a small wave: not interesting if it isn't you. What a surfer sees in the original image is his or her own participation at the break: how easy it is to walk down from the deck and thread some fun, relatively inconsequential tubes. No hell paddle, no lineup difficulties, no nasty cleanup sets, nothing big enough to frighten: just pure joy.
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