On October 8-10, 2004, I walked 50 miles to help raise money to find a cure for Multiple Sclerosis. Of course I carried my camera with me for the walk. Saturday Morning was a beautiful misty morning, with some great light and a beautiful fog over the fields. About 2 miles or so into the walk, we passed a field with this strikingly beautiful scene -- a lone pumpkin remaining visible from the road. The image of solitude fit well with what we were doing that weekend -- a personal challenge as part of a greater whole.
Very little editing was done to this image -- A moderate levels ajustment to increase contrast somewhat, a curves adjustment to push down the low end and bring up the high a little, auto-color, an 8×10 crop, resize and USM.
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When I opened this image, I instantly got a nostalgia for going to the pumpkin patch when I was a child. The pumpkin is a symbol of the harvest, and the isolation makes me think of the way one feels after thanksgiving. The holiday season can be lonely, and it usually begins when you start to see pumpkins around. I love the symbology, and the emotions it invokes.
Composition:
This is a good picture with a strong sense of placement. The eye is drawn directly to the place that you intended it, the pumpkin. There is really nowhere for it to go after that, and that can be okay, but I feel like another element would have helped. Perhaps something in the upper right of the photo to give a sense of balance would have helped. Given the fact that an element like that probably did not exist, I think that the photo would have been helped a little getting in closer to your subject. Think of the rule of thirds. This pumpkin is way on the bottom of the frame. If you would have gotten closer, and perhaps lower on it, you would have gotten the gord to take up almost a third of the frame. This also would have decreased your DOP, helping to accentuate that beautiful fog.
Lighting:
Good. I like the muted colors of the field. It really gives you that feeling of the loneliness of the season. It is hard to wrong with the evenly dispersed lighting that a cloudy day gives you in a situation like this.
Post processing:
I like what you have done mostly. I wish you would have given the pumpkin just a little more punch. If I were you, I would probably create a duplicate layer and make the mode linear burn. Then I would cut the pumpkin out of this layer. You can then tweak the opacity of the burn layer so that the surroundings of the pumpkin won’t fight for spectrum space as much as it does now. You could even make an additional layer and make it a gradient going from top to bottom so that that burn layer is bright on top, but graduates down to a darker value. This way your pumpkin pops out without having to over-saturate it, or make it too bright. Just some ideas.
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