West Wing #3

please compare with #1 and #2

Smart composition.

Funny, one of the first times I bump into one of your images in the RR queues: I will have a saying in the visibility of this!

 

Once I recover from this emotion, let me pull together my thought on this. For sure, but this you know already, I am more of a fan of the warm hues of the later hour on the building. Here (and on the other harsh-light one) I can hardly see the texture of the walls and I am more drawn to the elemental shapes rather than to any role of the building.

 

Actually, the elemental shapes in this horizontal frame work better than in the harsh-light vertical one. I guess that the reason is the balance of the white and blue areas implied by the fact the blue is not so blue anymore thanks to the cloud. So, I visualise a flux from left to right (what is hard in the vertical shot) from white, through blue, to white again.

 

As for the elemental shapes, here I sometimes get the blue popping at my eyes, and see nothing else than the jagged line which splits the frame between the two colours. No fingers nor gearwheels, but rather a nose?

Here the two buildings merge into one shape, so it's kind of hard to miss the nose as an interpretation of the negative space, isn't it? It wasn't really intentional; more another version of the yin / yang interpretation, using the slight tilt of the camera to create a false horizon which disorients the viewer.

 

Without your rate, this gets below four for aesthetics. . . . . and people wonder why I rave on in the feedback forum. :-)

With Salvatore, I prefer the warmer tones of the other shot but I love the compostion of this, Having stood there, I'm still not sure where you shot this from. Just great. You should know the ratings game by now! It's irritating, but I'm not sure there's a solution. Just keep shooting and we'll keep looking cuz these are some great shots.

Bill, for all three of these shots, I'm standing quite close to the base of the building with a 28mm focal length shooting almost straight up. The relative position of the two parts of the building are determined by the position of the shadow the right one casts on the left.

in the images you have presented i feel that the negative & positive spaces, or as you have referred to the yin/yang, are the critical elements. i prefer #'s 1 & 3 as the colour component in #2 takes my eye away from the yin/yang by pushing the perception more towards

issues of architecture.

 

i find these compositions very strong in their minimalist approach by taking the information

which has been captured to "another level", "painterly" in many respects.

 

well seen, & well presented.

 

If I print #2, a compromise might work best for the reasons you mention, splitting the difference in color saturation between the polarized and non-polarized versions . . . . quite easy to do in PS.

I like the pure forms of all tree of them even n. 2 is more "static" in appearance than the other two.

What a great shot, Carl. The wall texture against that dark blue sky is great!

Best regards from Kenya,

Mark Anthony Kathurima

I went back to reshoot this with my D200 and have concluded that getting the color of the building right (how late in the afternoon) and getting the sky right (to polarize or not), not to mention exposure, is more difficult than I would have imagined. So is trying to duplicate earlier compositions with a wide angle lens. Fortunately, I visit this place a lot, so I'll have plenty of opportunities.

 

My only regret here is that the cloud wasn't more prominent.