Photo Critique: "Boulder," February 3, 2023

[Tin Can]

Just now USPS delivered 2 nice prints from our discussion aka 'crit' of H20man's images

A delightful surprise

Thank you!

Lot's of valuable, and FUN input here - thank you! Here are a few specific replies, sorry if I don't get to all of you:

Iga: That line of trees is about 1/2 km long, so no lack of material! I DO have a couple color images from there, need to do some B&W.

xkaes: I somewhat dread the thought of walking the 45 minutes up there with my 5 foot aluminum ladder, but I may give it a try...

cowanw: "documentary" is not a nasty word to me - I love Timothy O'Sullivan, Carleton Watkins, ... I've seen some pretty good photography in person, and amongst my favorites were a bunch of large albumen prints by Watkins. They are beautiful.

bmikiten: I've tended toward smaller and smaller prints lately, but I have both large and small of this one and, in my opinion, it benefits from size.

johnasavio: I've thought of trying to get up there for sunrise, but when I think of trekking up there alone in the dark with a headlamp, I start getting cougarnoia! But maybe if I had the aluminum ladder on my back, that might deter them?

Ulophot: My botanist friends would inform us that all those aspen trees might be part of a single organism, adding to your biological interpretation!

OK, I gotta go re-scan that negative and try some other crops!

[Tin Can]

h2oman

I prefer your second image, the perspective creates mystery

Infers movement, the shadows almost hide

Trees confuse wonderfully

Is all alive or all dead

I prefer this 'portrait' orientation

Is the central subject moving, perhaps

The object has directional elements implying movement or just clothed by wind

Bug or giant?

Good print with movement aspiring

[h2oman]

Thanks! Speaking of the object, do you have those in your neck of the woods? They are fairly ubiquitous here in the west, but one wouldn't expect to see one in such a setting!

[Tin Can]

I have seen them in Texas

Not so good on motorbike, especially at night, when they attack!

Thanks! Speaking of the object, do you have those in your neck of the woods? They are fairly ubiquitous here in the west, but one wouldn't expect to see one in such a setting!

[h2oman]

I have seen them in Texas

Not so good on motorbike, especially at night, when they attack!

[Alan Klein]

It's obviously a rock, and quite possibly an old glacial "erratic". I find the composition just too busy. If you want to feature all that nice texture in the boulder, all those trees in the background just compete with it, or visa vera. To juggle both, you'd either need to back off and make to make the boulder look smaller, or move closer in, to make it bigger still. As it is, they just compete for attention and neither wins. Or just experiment cropping into the scene more when printing, so that the rock becomes dominant. Easiest, you could trim from the bottom. The rock is "floating" too high in the grass, and all that excessive brightness down there is competing with the highlights in the trees and top of the rock itself.

It's all a matter of proportion and balance, and our mind instinctively wants that big heavy object lower down. That's something architects are often taught - to visually "weight" things, and what the ancient Greeks knew building their temples. Give it the feeling, "gravity is working". But with a little intelligent cropping, I think you could have something nice. Just lowering the image on my screen so that most of the "lawn" is cropped off is a significant improvement to me. Yeah, it's a lot narrower, longer rectangle that way; but I prefer that too. More dynamic.

Here's a glacial erratic I shot in NYS just above NYC in Westchester County. I used to live in Queens where the glaciers terminated 10,000 years ago there and across Brooklyn where the British marched during the US Revolutionary War in 1776 when it captured Long Island and New York. Most New Yorkers walk by these things everyday and have no idea what interesting things have happened under the feet.
Glacier Kettle Pond in QUeens https://www.flickr.com/photos/alankl...7627487899061/
Erratic in NYS above NYC https://www.flickr.com/photos/alankl...7627487899061/

[jtomasella]

I feel this should be a square crop