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gdanmitchell wrote:
Since you asked for feedback and critique, I'm going to venture a guess that you really want more than just "great photo!" type responses - though those do feel good, too, and the confirmation that you are on the right track is useful. With that context in mind, here are some thoughts and reactions.
I like your idea of focusing on the small in the landscape, and picking out the cactus as a particular representative of this landscape. Often a photograph of a subject within the landscape, like this one, can reveal more of the character of the larger landscape than a simply photograph of the whole thing.
I also note your use of the familiar "near-far" juxtaposition approach to landscape photography, in which a nearby object such as your cactus is placed close to the camera, often shot with a wide angle lens, and a more distant element of the larger landscape appears beyond, creating a sense of depth and helping place that close subject within the larger context of the place.
The backlight on the plant and its needles helps to separate it visually from the darker background of desert and rocky pillars, and it evokes that quality of looking into very bright light that we all know from photographing and being in this sort of desert environment.
It is apparent that you gave some thought to composition and the spatial relationships among the near plant, the further plant, and rock towers.
I have a few observations about things that might be done a bit differently - think of them as food for thought more than as "what's wrong with the photo." They are things that I observe and that I might think about if the photograph was my own. It is the same thought process that I apply to my own photographs.
I'll bet your camera was carefully leveled, however the scene looks to me like it is tilted downward to the right. Objectively level is a good thing, but subjectively level is perhaps also important. Things that contribute to this effect are the rightward tilt of the further cactus plant and the downward tilt of the subjective horizon at the base of the rock towers. I understand that they look this way because those further to the right are probably also further away, but the effect is still what it is. (The backlight on the towers diminishes the details there that might otherwise give us better distance cues and counteract the sensation of the downward tilt.) Notice also that the furthest cluster of smaller cholla plants also tilts down to the right. This is a tricky thing - you don't want to tilt things way to the left, since that can create its own issues, but you might want to try a bit of counter-clockwise rotation to diminish the tilting sensation. You could also try a bit of perspective adjustment to increase the vertical size on the right side of the frame.
The scene provides some very complicated compositional challenges. One of the most difficult - and it certainly was an exposure challenge as well - is the very bright spot of sun in the upper right. I think that you probably intended the foreground cholla to be the primary center of visual attention, but that bright area is so prominent that it, for me at least, draws my eye more strongly than the cholla plant. Given that it really is a lot brighter than the shaded side of the plant that is the primary visual element in the lower center, this isn't an easy problem to solve. If I were shooting this I would almost certainly exposure-bracket the shot, getting at least one good exposure on the dark areas of the cholla and at least one "darker" exposure that retained cloud details in that very bright area - and they I would have combined them in post. This wouldn't totally deal with the strong visual attraction of the sunny area, but it would perhaps at least put a bit more interesting detail there, since you could have avoided or at least minimized the area that blows out all the way to white.
I don't know if it is an artifact of creating the downsized image for web display or perhaps it appears before you do that, but I see some sharpening halos around the rock tower - visible as a slight brighter area right at the edge where the rock and sky meet. A challenge in this photograph is that sharpening settings that likely work well for the cholla probably also leave you with the halos between rock and sky. There are several ways to try to minimize this. You could (if you are using software that allows you to do more than one sharpening layer) sharpen the lower and upper portions of the image separately. You might also simply try a smaller radius and/or amount to see if you can find a compromise that sharpens foreground enough without overdoing the edges of the rocks.
A little more in the way of observations about composition... basically two observations:
1. To my eye, the foreground plant seems a bit "crowded" by the edges of the frame. This is certainly a very subjective thing, but I would prefer to see a bit more room to either side of the plant and probably below it as well. (Or, as an alternative, go with the tight framing and even cut off a bit of the edges of the plant, thus perhaps focusing even more attention on the plant shapes and textures.)
2. Though I obviously wasn't there to know what other limits you were working with, I wonder if somehow moving the camera position a bit might have moved that very bright sun area out of the frame, perhaps eliminated the extraneous bit of mountain at the far right, reduced that apparent tilt just a bit, and possibly simplified the rocky background a bit. I'm imagining moving back and to the right a tiny bit and raising the camera slightly. (Of course, there might have been some giant distraction just outside the frame that I can't see! ;-)
Nice work though, and I'm really intrigued by these plants!
Dan...Show more →
Thanks Dan for your lengthy response. I appreciate that you took the time.
Seems that the issue brought up most is the apparent tilt to the photo. It hadn't bothered me, but I might take a shot at giving it a more level appearance. Thanks for your thoughts on that.
To address the issue of the sun, this was a creative choice I made. I shot many photos at different times and exposures from this one position. I chose to include a bright area of sunlight to emphasize the fact that these cacti were being heavily backlit. Had I hid the sun behind the rock formation, it wouldn't have seemed natural to me to have the heavy backlight, but no sun shining directly at it. The glare of the sun is strong, but it was just something I chose to do because I like it, and to me, this is what this moment felt like... the sun was shining right into my eyes.
Compositionally, this area is really hard. There is so much stuff everywhere, that it proved really difficult to organize a scene into a neat and tidy composition. I felt this was the best composition I got while there. I shot some others, and a few others work, but overall, Cholla are hard to frame, if you ask me, especially when combined with blooming brissle brush, octillo, saguaro, etc. It was one of the more difficult areas for finding good compositions I've come across so far.
And the halos from sharpening, I'm aware... but this was a throw away upload. I embedded it here from facebook, which does a crappy job with uploads. It looks fine when I uploaded elsewhere.
Anyway, thanks for your feedback!
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Clipped just a bit of the cactus at the bottom. But minor. Great shot