Sherwood Garden _02

I'm very happy with this subject matter, only generally happy with the way you've composed it, and unhappy with the tonal qualities. Were this mine, I would have spent more time and care with the scrinting because, in a sense, Mark is right: The subject is very common. Therefore, your treatment has to be novel, or executed with such excellence that the casual viewer will not recognize the common nature of the subject because they are too busy being impressed with how well you've handled your camera work, or printing, etc. In other words, how your personal vision of what this is is overlaid on top of what it actually is.

Without going any metaphysical detail, I see this subject as a whole object, yet your rendition of gray tones tends to separate the tree into sections: Lighter at the bottom, darker as the eye goes upwards. The background continues this division in separating the tree from its environment. Whether that's the way the light was in real life is not really important, I don't think. It's how you want to present this subject.

You provided the basic image. Taking this, my approach was to regard the tree as one subject, the background as another, with some blending taking place along the ground, and only with respect to the background. In other words, the tonality of the print has to clearly support the tree as the subject.

So, I burned the bottom of the image, and a little on each of the sides. Using the dodge tool set to highlights, I dodged the trunk to bring up the highlight values. I then played with the curves to bring up all the values overall because they had grown visibly dark with my burning.

The result, I think, shows a subject with as much mass as it's been given in the composition, and more character, to boot. It stands solidly out from the background, without leaving the background behind.

I would have liked to have seen a little more root in the forground, I think. That's what I as unhappy about regarding the composition.