When a photo has a single strong focal point which contrasts strongly with the background it\'s a sure bet the viewer\'s instinctive perception process will skip to it and fixate on it. Recognizing that the photographer should think about how long they are likely to dwell on it, where their attention will be drawn next, what of interest they will find when they get to the end of that leading line, and finally whether or not they will find their way back to the more important main focal point for a second look before leaving the photo.
When I evaluate the photo along those lines I see a strong focal point, rendered less interestingly in B&W than it would have been in color. Bright colors is one of the more compelling aspects of flowers. Take away the color and they are less interesting. The B&W conversion creates strong contrast, but a color version would also have strong COLOR contrast between the flowers and foliage.
I suspect that second flower in the background would be a more compelling secondary focal point in a color version of the same shot, but that raised the question of whether or not to tempt the viewer off the main focal point with another flower. As when telling a joke sometimes it\'s better to just deliver the \"punchline\" then end the story. In a photo that\'s done with cropping decisions.
When there is a strong foreground focal point the question to ask yourself is how much background context is needed for the viewer to understand the story. For example if the flower was growing out of a crack in the sidewalk in Times Square or near the rim of the Grand Canyon including that background context would ad a new level of interest to the visual narrative and story that the viewer\'s mind creates from the clues in the photo. Here the background, which is given many more pixels than the focal point, really doesn\'t add anything to the story. Instead it distracts from the focal point by tempting a curious eye to explore the \'negative\' space in the hope of finding some other visual reward hidden there.
When critiquing photos of others I\'ll crop in tight on what is the obvious main focal point then expand the frame outwards slowly adding context and moving the focal point around in the frame to play any lines me away off the corners of the frame, so when my eye does follow a stem or leaf from the flower it hits a corner of the frame and \"bounces back\" like a billiard ball on a pool table.
For this one I\'d crop out the second flower and curved leaf above it. There a nice leading line in the leaves connecting the two flowers, but the second smaller out-of-focus one isn\'t as interesting as the one in the foreground so I view it as a distraction diluting the impact of the first.
Whenever you use a horizontal crop and put the main focal point near one side it sends a subliminal message to the viewer to go explore the space. Cropping in from the right and making it a vertical crop will make the main focal point larger and more compelling and keep the viewer\'s attention locked on it longer because there\'s nothing else to catch the eye. I think that works better for this shot because the second flower in the background isn\'t interesting or needed for context to tell the story here, which is simply \"Come look at this interesting flower I found\".
May 18, 2013 at 08:17 AM
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