From: caroleigh@c...
Date: Thu Nov 18, 2004 9:19 am
Subject: Critique: Rich Baker (S-Curves: 3 photos)
Oregon Beach Walk - Hmmm, I seem to recall seeing this photo in another
class depicting the concept of "emptiness." You clever guy --
making a photo do double duty! I liked the photo then and I like it now
-- perfect S-curve. Now I'm seeing the photo in a different light. I don't
remember what I said about this photo before, but you know what I'm thinking
now? I'm thinking that if you cloned out the two people on the left and
just had the one person walking there in the lower right, that the photo
would have more impact. What do you think? Right now the three people
don't seem to be related to one another -- and I'm not sure who to look
at. But if you got rid of the guy on the left, the little kid, and left
the one person there in the water, the photo would be cleaner, simpler,
and you'd notice the S-curve more.
Chaff Cutter - Wonderful curves, wonderful light, wonderful S-curve. Clean,
simple, abstract image. I like how you placed the wheel and I even like
the nail or whatever that thing is that leads our eye down and out of
the frame off to the lower right. Nicely done.
Lupine Curve - Beautiful. Just beautiful. And I like the shallow depth
of field so that the foreground lupine is the one we really notice the
most. The light is exquisite. Photographing this on a sunny day would
have (probably) resulted in darker shadows, more glare, and the colors
would not have been as saturated.
As an aside: In an intimate landscape such as this, any time we have dark
shadows and/or glare, those are places in our photos where color will
NOT come through, thus reducing the colorful impact of a photo. (You rarely
see colors in shadows; you rarely see color in glaring hot spots.) So,
as we saw when we were photographing fall color . . . Bright sunshine?
Go for the big picture. Overcast skies? Go for the intimate landscape.
Getting back to your photograph. What if you were to have chosen a smaller
f/stop? A smaller f/stop, or aperture, will give you much more in focus
from front to back. The photo may have been equally as impactful, since
we'd be seeing sharply focused lupines from front to maybe all the way
back to the trees. That could have been dramatic, too. But I like this
shot and think you did a wonderful job with it. Kudos.
Carol Leigh
