That is no country for old menby
gminkComment: Critique Club Comment:
Very interesting capture in the face of impending, um, dust!! Given your description there was obviously some sense of urgency to capture this, and ultimately avoid it, so realize that I am aware of that as a factor within my critique.
I really like the tonality of the photo and how the gold plays off the blue. While one of the previous comments states that they love how it fills the frame, I actually would prefer a bit more space around it so I could see the full extent of the storm. I'd also would have loved something there to give me a sense of scale. Having never seen one personally I have trouble deciding if this is truly as massive as it looks if I consider the dark area to the left is foothills of some type, or if what I'm looking at is just a bunch of dry earth kicking up in a 2 acre field. I'm also troubled by what I'm interpreting as noise. Obviously, in a dust storm like this what appears to be noise could be REAL noise within the cloud, but it reminds me of artifacts that come from boosting structure and clarity. Across the top of the cloud I'm also seeing what appears to be repeated lines that typically show when something has been cloned out, like a power line may have run across the image originally. I'm not convinced that's what I'm seeing as it could possibly be white clouds beyond the dust storm, but regardless it gives that illusion.
Given that the crop is flatter than the 3:2 ratio you'd get straight out of camera you have obviously eliminated some of the original image, and if in fact this is a severe crop that would also explain why I'm perceiving this level of noise in an image shot at ISO 250.
All that said it is still a very fine capture. That said, I will admit to giving you a 5, primarily because I felt that the image did not fit the poem, at least not the line you chose for it. Perhaps more fitting for the movie/book whose title was taken from the line, but not as it exists in the poem. Not quite DNMC area, but close for me, as were a lot in this challenge. Now, had you gone with "perne in a gyre" I would have likely given you a 7 as did most others.
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