Where Ansel Walkedby
ericwooComment: Greetings From Critique Club!
a pre-emptive apology: it must be frustrating getting a "critique" from a photographer less skilled than you are, but frankly there is a dearth of people willing to give critiques. Perhaps my point of view as a viewer of your photo will be helpful to you.
I see sooooo many landscapes at DPC. I feel that landscapes perfectly embody half of the photographic equation: the composition. There is no confusion in a landscape about the "subject" of the photo. Everything in the photo is the subject of the photo.
The other half of the photographic equation is perfectly embodied by candids: the freezing of time. Landscapes are so often lacking this quality, which makes so many of them look lifeless to me. But this is not a *problem* with landscapes, it is simply a challenge. No matter what picture you take, you will be challenged to make it stand out, to make it transcend whatever category the viewer will be tempted to put it in.
Landscape was your challenge, and you chose to tackle the problem the way quite a few people did: using image grain to create a nostalgic sense. In other words, you give the illusion of "freezing time", of capturing a past time. In some ways this seems contradictory to what most people think of as the camera's ability to catch a fleeting, contemporary spark of NOW, but in reality it meets the requirement well. Space is flattened and time is frozen: a photograph!
You chose to do a tribute to Ansel Adams. I don't associate the grain with Ansel, but the composition and tones are quite reminiscent. Interestingly, it feels not so much like an Ansel Adams photograph as it does the product of a documentarian photographer who somehow got himself into Ansel's world, or perhaps simply took a photo of an Ansel Adams photograph. It really is an interesting effect, more interesting than mere imitation.
I gave this a 6 because the foreground area just wasn't interesting enough. Something about that road in particular robbed me of the illusion that I was looking where Ansel walked.
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