Carry me!, and show me the world.by
ValdoComment by Bear_Music: ***CRITIQUE CLUB RESPONSE***
Ivaldovi,
There's a lot to like in this image, but just as much keeping me from liking it a LOT, if you get my drift. I'm going to discuss the picture outside the context of the challenge, if that's ok? The reason is, as a "wind" challenge entry I don't think it works especially well, speaking more to me of serentity than of the turmoil of wind. You'll understand what I mean if you think of "Forrest Gump"; when the feather was floating around it was soft and swoopy, not being carried agressively by a wind. In fact, what was noticeable in "Gump" was the
absence[/i) of wind, the condition of a feather falling in calm conditions.
The more I look at this picture, the more I deduce it was either shot vertically (in an actual breeze) and rotated 90 degrees, or perhaps shot with the arch up and the downy feathers hanging through fravity, then rotated 180 degrees. Speaking of the orientation of the image now, it is lit from directly below.
As has been mentioned by several critiquers, the framing of the shot is unfortunate; the image is too far up and the feather is truncated on the left. From this I deduce that you were probably [i]holding the feather, perhaps in your fingers, and thus had no choice but to cut the shaft off where you did. Regard;less of how this came about, it seems a bad decision to me. I'd really like to see the entire feather here, it's the only way you can really give me that sense of floating free that the image needs so badly. Condisering the extreme darkness of the background, you probably could have done this with a very thin wire inserted into the shaft and spray-painted matte black.
Another issue is the lighting. While it's not bad, I feel it could be improved if the light source were not only beaneath the feather but also a little behind it, so there's a trace of translucent backlighting. Did you try this?
Finally, given that the challenge is "wind" it might have been better not to have the feather so squared up within the frame, but rather at some sort of an angle. This could be just a matter of the same edge-on view but a less-horizontal alignment, but arguably the feather itself should be twsited somewhat in 3 dimensions. In other words, while keeping the same edge-on view, perhaps rotate the feather about its shaft so the far side is a little higher than the near side. Then rotate the feathet like a clock face, so it's maybe 30 degrees off vertical. This ought to bring a little more dynamics to the image, suggest a sense of movement.
These suggestions are not that radically different from what you've done, just a matter of tweaking things for a less-static image.
Let me know if you do any more experimenting with this...
Robt.
Message edited by author 2004-12-27 21:45:57. 
Photographer found comment helpful.