Offices With A View

I must confess I’m a bit torn with the composition of this one. On the one hand, the composition is very strong, with a great centre of interest, so it works very very well I think. The horizontal lines draw me in, pull me along, and tease me to some extent because I’m trying to ‘see’ what the lines and shapes actually are – it seems to be a crane of some type, but the slight distortion is delicious, it puts my mind into a sort of “yes, but what does it REALLY look like” frame. Then I go back into the image as a whole again.

This brings me to where I am torn. I think I can see why you have composed and cropped it that way, but I’m in two minds about the way you have included the beginning of the next wall on the left. On the other hand, I like it because it suggests what’s on the left, i.e. how the image continues (and also shows just the nub end of the ‘crane’, to finish it off for the eye perhaps?) but yet I wonder. I wonder what would it look like a bit further back? (although of course I realise that pulling back is not always possible) I wonder if it looks a bit tidier with the ‘nub’ nipped off? To try that out, I have cropped it out and posted with these comments – what do you think?

I also love the colours, the chocolate against the blue, a simple but very effective contrast. Lots of lovely things to talk about in this image, a joy to view because of all the interesting dimensions (love the feeling of depth). I would be interested in your thoughts on the crop I’ve done. Thanks for sharing such a great image. Cheers, Anthea

@ AJ khadash: thanks for your kind words!

@ Anthea Scotte: Thanks for giving such an extensive critique!

The composition was kind of forced by the two panes near bottom-left, which distorted the reflection much more than the others. I wanted to catch a whole "bulge" in a pane. (It's just the crane's cabin, but heavily distorted.) This is how the nub got on the next wall.

In post-processing, I chose to keep the nub just for the fun of it, no serious reason. Your cropped version is simpler and, according to my basic rules, better :)

I took this picture just for fun, it was fun processing it in Capture NX2 (still learning) and I posted it on Photo.net as an experiment, for everybody here seem to favor bold colors. I never expected anybody to like it as much as you have. But looking at your portfolio, I can see that this picture comes close to your kind of photography (shapes and patterns).

Thanks, see you around!