sydney coastline #2 Sunburst finish

The centered rock is a good reference for the moving elements. This style is unique and creative. Web publishing skill is excellent too.

Larger Version

Brilliant! I love the composition, contrast & colours. I envy your ability to get such a wide range of colour & light into one shot.

 

Well done!

All I can say is congratulations Leigh its about time !

As to the people commenting on the lack intimacy, etc.

Landscape photographs made with MF or LF cameras should be viewed

at sizes of 16x20 inches or larger. Photo.net is a world of web wonders.

Leigh works to reveal stunning, detailed landscapes of infinite complexity and variation. The tiny snippet of a photo you see here

can only hint at the visual content you would experience in a big print.

 

Ansel Adams 'Moonrise at Hernandez' is arguably the finest B&W landscape print ever made. Viewed in a tiny box of pixels, people would wonder why anyone might feel that way. Viewed as a 24x30 inch print, its stunning.

To me the colors are just unbelievably fantastic. Terrific shot. It blows me away.

the DOF is wonderful, colors translation are giving a great feeling of the scene , as well as that amazing lighting, over all the work is so profissional and welldone

The rock reminds me of a steak, a New York Strip, seared and grilled "to perfection." The other colors remind me of those orange cream popsicles we used to buy from the ice cream truck. mmmm, good.

Doug - you are supposed to analyze photos with your brain not your stomach.

If I saw this at 'full' size on a gallery wall I think I'd be blown away by the great tones and subtleties of the composition, but at this size it looks simply 'very good', not excellent. I love the curves of the sand and the detail in the sea - it is a technically great shot... but in my opinion it is lacking in the more obvious drama that smaller images need to have a 'wow' factor. And I agree about the lack of 'human' interest mentioned before. At full size in a gallery space I might feel a sense of delicious solitude...but in my cluttered room, staring into a CRT I am not transported away... Still, it's a shot I'd be incredibly proud of if I'd shot it myself ;-)

Well well, I always thought Doug B. was on another planet, but finally I think I grasp where he is coming from.... he is most certainly spending too much time looking inside his fridge.

Congrats on this POW Leigh. You have many brilliant photographs and this one is just superb. The feeling of open space and fresh sea air really conveys itself well in your capture. Even using an ND Grad I am still astounded by the exposure working so well shooting into the sun. My guess is that film really does have a latitude advantage over digital [which I am more used to working with].

I gave the composition some thought, particularly the unbalanced aspect which Dave N. observes, but I ended up thinking much the same as David Estlund; that the overriding feeling is the meeting of dark and light, postive-negative. The rock is positioned between the 'two worlds'. Also, I think any uncomfortableness of the centered rock is offset quite well with the smaller rock to the right, which helps the balance considerably.

Thanks for the thoughtful comments. I've updated the image with a larger version.

 

Some background on the shot. It was taken on a large format camera with a 6x9 roll film back. The 38mm lens is equivalent to roughly 16mm on a 35mm camera. Although there is not much evidence of 'wide angle effect', the shot encompasses a wide slice of sky, which is why the weather and light vary so much from left to right.

 

In composing, I stood back to include the S-curve coastline rather than moving in on the rock. Even so, with this superwide lens, I was only a 2-3 meters from the rock.

Love the colors- exposure is 'spot on' as they say over in England.

 

If I saw this through my viewfinder though, the first thing I would say to myself is I have to move closer to the rocks. That is how you will get a greater sense of depth. Making 2D look 3D, afterall, is the goal. And you will usually get some good algae coloration and barnacle detail once you are up close. I also agree with Dave Nitsche about the balance. It's left heavy. The artist himself stated he was not sure about the balance/ open sky on left, heavy dark on right, etc.. Cropping this one did not help.

 

Standing in the waves, tripod shoved down into the sand and praying it does not sink further while taking the image would be an option I would have tried. (It would not be the first time it would have been necessary. Just have to keep an eye out on the waves and be ready to thrust the whole setup skyward; bigger sets do happen). Then the rock would have been down in the front lower left, sky with sun maybe in the upper right. Get that circular composition going if possible.

 

I could not figure out why the clouds were so dark in the upper right, as the water below it does not mirror thay type of light. After reading about the ND filter it made sense. But it shows how it could be a problem with the light so dramatically different across the horizon. Maybe a bit of dodging would balance it out more. Blessings, MS

I don't really like the rock in the middle. Moving the tripod to the left and angling right would have put the rock further to the right and lower, and with more of the dark cloud in the frame, and the sunburst coming in from the left corner would have made the picture better balanced and more atmospheric. That's how I would have done it at any rate, but then I'm only one man...

Very nicely captured with excellent detail, color, and light. Well done!

As a 'Nature' photographer I find 3-stop ND-grads produce 'implausible-looking' images - imagine someone sent that photo from Saturn's moon Europa. How would you describe an atmosphere where the ground is brighter than the sky, where light travels from dark areas to bright areas, and all the laws of physics and optics are reversed (*end of temporary rant*)...

Excellent photo. The image is proof that even the most mundane of subjects can be treated with originality.

What makes this image stand out is the colors that are different in each quarter, the composition that centers the rock, the TV chosen to soften the sand and mu;titude of detail. One of the best I have seen. Congratulations.

hm.... when I look at the picture and think "I wish I were there to see it with my own eyes"... it means that the shot is great. And in this particular case I have this exact feeling.

 

Great shot of a very usual theme.

it looks like a painting: everything in its place: objects, colors... just beautiful. If it were a painting, I would have thought: "hey, too perfect and classic to be real". But it is real.

Symphonic. The clarity and range of tones here are absolutely stunning, and indeed transporting. Leigh's Sunburst restates our response of sublimity and awe while in the presence of such piercing beauty. Here the viewer is the human element, and Leigh has been most generous in the gift he has provided.

This is a beautiful image, the fact it is a sunset doesn?t matter, in fact, the fact it is a shoreline doesn?t. It is about color, light, material and the physical properties of sea-water.

 

I do enjoy this photograph quite a bit, because it transcends it?s subject ? something some people who have read what I have said in the past know is important to me.

 

However, and this is not a criticism of the image itself, but rather something which I have noticed about color photography today, which is very apparent in the image above, is it real?

 

I am not suggesting that this image is manipulated, and even if it were a fabrication of all seven seas, I wouldn?t care. It is an effective image, effective whether it is paint, silver halide and dye, or colored pencil. Regardless how this image was created, it works, and works very well.

 

What I mean by this is, is this photograph a photograph of the ?greener grass?, an imaginary world which only exists in photographs, taken out of context, making a stunning place of an otherworldly beauty? Why is it then, for a successful photograph to have that, or other similar qualities? It?s fairly obvious, the majority is more willing to accept black and white as art than color, this, in my opinion, is evidence of the fact.

 

I am not saying that Perry lied, or did something to specifically lie, however, what is our fascination with beauty and what does that say about postmodern photography? It seems to me, sometimes, photography is more interested in the classicalism of the renaissance and the form of modernism than it is in the conceptualism of the postmodernism of today.

 

Could Ansel and Company, with the F64 convention, actually retarded photography, skipping conceptual postmodernism entirely?

I agree with Richard Mittleman. I think the rock would be compositionally better suited to the lower right hand corner. The colors and lighting are otherwise spectacular.

From a technical aspect this is a very well done photo (and more!) but apart from the initial 'wow effect' it fails to provoke any thoughts or feelings to me.

Shawn, the point you make has some validity, especially given the use of such a wide angle lens and a grad filter. Having said that, I find all of Leigh's landscape shots to be both breathtakingly beautiful, yet restrained in his treatment of color palate which for me makes the image accessible not just as an attractive image, but as a place that I can relate to. It's interesting how the perspective of this shot makes us feel a bit removed from the scene despite the use of a wide angle, yet it's nice to see this approach as an alternative to the usual composition where the FG takes up 75% of the image space (although I've got several of the latter on my favorites page.)

 

Congrats on POW, Leigh. I hope all the budding landscape photographers will put you on their interesting person's list.

Beautiful and moody image, I like the light/darkness counterpoint and overall atmosphere, good job. ES

This is a great shot. I love the color palette and the wet sand texture. The exposure is

dead on and the light is dramatic.

A couple of things bother me though. First the position of the sun in the frame looks a bit

off to me and second my eyes are attracted to the blue sky on the top left corner and out

of the main subject (the rock). As suggested above I think the image becomes even more

dramatic and beautiful when a third of the sky is cropped out, just below the blue sky. The

result, to me, is that the image is simplified to its main attractions: the rock, the water, the

sand, and the dark clouds. As a second point of interests the sun ends up at a better

location within the frame as well. If preferred a tiny crop on the right side would move the

rock out of its center position. Both rock positions work fine.

I would love to hang such a image on my wall.

Congratulations.