Augustby
ZoomdakComment by e301: From the Critique Club
Hi Thomas - just spent a diverting minute or several trawling through your favourites. Good to be writing for a lover of the sydney harbour Bridge shot :-)
Strong organisation of elements here - solid compositional skills brought to bear with strong balance and effective cropping. There is the very slightest tilt to the horizon, though I wouldn't have noticed it had it not been mentioned in comments, and I had to scroll the image to the edge of my page to proove it. I wouldn't have though it a big deal, but I wonder if it doesn't perhaps add a subconscious element of uneasiness to the shot?
My dislike of it - no, that's a touch strong: I don't 'dislike' it - what it that makes it not-terribly-appealing to me, is, I think, that it seems to be sending a certain message, communicating a certain mood, but that there are strong elements that work against that, and that don't seem to work toward a particular contrast or useful contradiction.
On first look it has that feel of the ending of a good sunny summer's day. A calm sea, a gentle, smooth deserted beach (oh, and it most certainly did not require the presence of a couple hand-in-hand to make it, by the way: that would have made it trash sentimentality). But the presence of those sharp lines of the dune grass, too strongly present to be simply a fill for the negative space there, and too chaotic to be compositionally contributory to the feeling, and the small line of clouds, perhaps take away from that impact, though what they work towards is beyond me. It leaves the shot without either the hyper-simple composition of a more graphically-oriented image, nor the great detail and strong sense of focus (in terms of subject) of a landscape.
I think also that the graphic elemnts that are present here perhaps work against you. The strongly dark areas (not black, but almost - could have used a touch of levels to go one way or the other perhaps?) do not form a coherent basis for the shot - especially the way in which the shpaes of the exposed sand and the leaves interact - they seem arbitrarily overlaid, with little sense of drving the eye through the frame. The strongest point, which seems to me to be the tonality of the lower sky and the reflections in the water, are intruded on massively by those leaves and banks of sand.
In the end, I think you did well to score so highly with this (I wonder, did the sunset help you there?) :-)
hope some of that confused and rambling thinking is of use
Ed
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