Belvedere

I would like to see a 36" photo of this. Really sharp. Good framing. Great composition. Nice color. Congratulations. 7 and 7

More blue sky, less brown grass would've improved this photograph. Putting the horizon at 2/3 down the picture would've been just about right.

Paul, I suspect that what you have in mind is a totally different photograph. Moving the horizon from 2/3 up to 2/3 down completely changes the "meaning" (so to speak) of the image. Just for the fun of it, I am attaching a little Photoshop trick which shows the effect...

nice composition, love the blue&yellow, it makes nice contrast

It's the really sharp grass and yellow-brown color that I like. However; there is a lot of other things to like about this photograph.

Very nice composition. The contrast in color is excellent and thou the clouds take me striaght forward, the grass, fence and horizon keep taking me left back into the picture. Very Nice!

Michele,

 

I love this one. It reminds me of a Wyeth painting. He loved fields and open landscape. You have taken a rather orinary scene and made it very evocative. I feel a true sense of peace and tranquility when looking at this.

It appears that your photoshop trick has stretched the sky, and compressed the lower portion, changing the drop-off curve of the hill and yes, changing the meaning of the picture. I think I would've liked to see the hill drop off the corner of the picture by moving the horizon down, exposing more sky. However, it is still a very nice photograph as it is and worthy of the grades it's received.

I find this absolutley beautiful and peaceful! I love the colours and texture. You make me want to go to Italy even more!

Michell, I like the big piece of yellow weeds to the point of dorminating the entire scene, leaving very little sky and just two pieces of lamp post to give it the essential sense of scale.

Very good. The sense of space strong. And I thought I was the only person writing Fortran programs still!

Michele, this is a strong composition and works very very well. The gentleness of the clouds, and grasses balance the color swatches. Excellent!

Thank you for your critiques. Now I have re-cropped the image leaving more of the yellow weeds on the basis that this yellow expanse was indeed what caught my eye in taking the picture. Also, I am more and more drawn towards the square format (time to buy a 6x6?). One issue that I haven't satisfactorily solved is that of vignetting; I haven't been able to correct the lightness fall towards the corners that is clearly visible in this and other medium format photographs using either Paint Shop Pro or Photoshop. In the end I devised a circuitous technique based on numerically processing the lightness component (written as a .pgm text file in Paint Shop Pro) by a Fortran program (!), which is what I do in my research work on flow visualization images. But of course it is a cumbersome technique and does not allow any interactive control on the results. I would appreciate advice on vignetting compensation in Photoshop or other digital image processing software.

That's really appealing !

Hi Michele:

 

I had a little internal cropping debate (using my hand to "crop" the light posts) whether this might be better presented as a vertical with just the natural elements -- grass, water and sky, But I think not, Your original 120 version is the best one. --jim

Thank you all for your comments. Jim, cropping out the manufacts could be an idea, but I have to agree with Alan Chan that the rail and lamp posts help to give a sense of scale, without which the image is somehow undecided. It might be interesting, though, to leave just a single lamp post to this purpose. As it often happens, this photogenic weed shouldn't be there at all: it is actually a nuisance, full of ticks and dirt, and a good town administration would have it mowed at least every summer. Luckily we have a lousy administration...

Your whole portfolio is wonderful, and this is one of my favorites! It is mesmerizing. Each photo is a work of art, well thought-out. I also like the framing of them. Wonderful!!