Wild Mustangsby
goodtempoComment by Azrifel: ~~~~Critique Club Comment~~~~
Composition (content)
The composition is almost perfect. The angle at wich the bronze horses are shot is excellent, because it makes you feel the horses are running towards you, but make a turn at the last moment. The only things that take some of the power of the shot away are:
* The ear of the front horse is cut off by the uper frame border. And even when it is in, doesn't hur to leave some space between the subject and the border of the frame. I guess it happened by accident. After downloading and full screen viewing I often discover that the frame I considered perfect was slightly moved and cut a detail off.
* The horse with his head down is to close to the edge of the frame. The space at the left side gives some more depth for example and therefore that space is good.
This is a great photo subject. The fountain at the bottom makes this picture alive and kicking. The lighting is great, the artist who made these horses also did a very good job.
Background
Good thing the background is so dark, because it isn't beautiful. The windows reflect and glare and they seem to be in the field of focus, not nice.
There are two things I am thinking about:
* would a polarizing filter take the glare out of the windows and hopefully make them darker, or would it show what is behind them and create even more background noise?
* would a wider aperture (F2.8-F4) blur it more while keepin the horses in the field of focus?
Perhaps the polarizer would also take some of the glare of the water, not that that is a problem, but perhaps an interesting effect, might also do something about the Chromatic Abberation/blooming in the water at the bottomright corner. It would most like take the glare of the edge of the fountain in the bottom of the frame and make it even smoother then it already is.
Camera Work (Technical)
Excellent. Good depth of field (but see comment about background), excellent exposure, good focus, good sharpness. Using the high shutterspeed to freeze the water is a very good choice. As said by others, it really looks like they are running. Using a slower shutter would blur the water to much. Perhaps that was also the choice for F4.5, F2.8 would allow 1/250 at most, too bad that there is no ISO50 on the 707.
Whitebalance looks good to me.
Digital Processing (technical)
Good.
My opinion
Wonderful shot. Just a little bit better framing and a nicer background would really make it a winner.
(my pop.server is unreachable because of dns problems at the moment, so PM won't reach me)
Photographer found comment helpful.