The Cane Fireby
NodeComment by Koriyama: *critique club*
Greetings!
(There seems to be a thread about this photo which I don't know about. So, sorry for any duplication.)
The photo certainly fits the challenge theme well - the smoke covers over a 1/2 of the total frame. From the single comment below, I guess that you were surprised at you (perceived) low ranking and lack of comments. I'd like to address that here.
There are a few problems here that I'd like to talk about. The first is the subject. Your title includes 'fire', indicating the main point of the photo. Yet, there's little in the frame to make me feel something about this fire. Is it a big one? a small one? a controlled one? what is it? I might imagine that 'cane' means 'bamboo', but I can't see why that's being burnt here? There's nothing in the frame to answer these questions, or to hint to anything more than something burning. So, the subject feels weak - I'm left looking at something which means nothing to me, and at a frame where no clues are given. A human figure would give some indication of scale. A close up would give some clue about the nature of the fire. These are missing, yet something of the kind is required to take a burning object into the realm of the universal.
Technically, you could have chosen a more appropriate way of capturing the moment. I don't know the S7000, but I can imagine. (If I'm wrong, forgive me.) You say in your comments that it's difficult to capture both the flame and the smoke. That's because the dynamic range of the scene falls outside the captureable range of your camera. There are ways to get round that, some DPC-legal. Your shutter speed was 1/6 at iso 200 and aperture 4.4. Remembering that this was a members' challenge, you could have reduced the iso to 100 and the aperture to around f8 which would necessitate a much longer shutter speed, requiring a tripod. Calculate an exposure which would bring the brightest part of the scene just inside the histogram range and, using your photo manipulation software, bring up the darker areas. The lower iso would reduce noise, but that could be done using NeatImage. The tighter aperture would increase clarity and detail all around.
Compositionally, there isn't much involved here, and that's the crux of the matter. You haven't really thought about the shape of the smoke clouds or the placing of the fire in the frame, except for central and low. The smoke clouds themselves seem aimless, too. For this type of shot, you need to forget about the realism of how a bundle of canes on fire and concentrate on on or two graphic lines within the scene. If you had a human present, you could use that vertical to create a dynamic with a smoke or flame line. At any rate, your photo shows how the eye might see such a scene, not how a graphic artist would interpret the action and create a sense of wow from the given material.
If you have any comments on this critique, please feel free to contact me.
Best wishes,
Jim
Photographer found comment helpful.
