Eternal Peaceby
dippydazComment by ClubJuggle: Greetings from the Critique Club!
I'll start by saying that for what it is, I like this image. This has a painterly feel to it, sort of Claude Monet meets Salvador Dali. It's quite an enjoyable piece of artwork; one you should be proud of.
With that said, I do feel compelled to say that this falls somewhat outside what I would expect to see in even an Expert Editing challenge. The Expert Editing rules do remind participants to "[p]lease remember ...that this is a photography contest. You are encouraged to keep your entries photographic in nature, and voters are encouraged to rate entries accordingly."
Though this is, in my opinion, an excellent piece of artwork, I find it difficult to classify this as "photographic in nature." Though I did not vote in this challenge, I must confess that if I had, I almost certainly would have deducted a few points as suggested by the above guideline.
Of course, none of this takes away from the quality of the artwork itself, and to be fair, I do feel I owe you a critique on that artwork.
The light in this photograph seems to draw the viewer's eye down from top center, toward the bridge, and around it clockwise. There, the flow is abruptly interrupted by the ghost horse. By having the horse overlap the bridge, it prevents the eye from following this natural flow created by the light. Instead, I might have placed the horse a little lower in the frame, so its head was clear of the bridge. This would require some careful editing as it would result in its legs being partially obscured by the tall grasses in the foreground. It may have also required some careful cloning of the ground cover so as to give the horse something on which to graze.
Overall, though, this is indeed a beautiful image. Nice work.
~Terry
Photographer found comment helpful.