Snow Sculpture

Wind carved snow near John Muir trail. Comments and/or suggestions

appreciated. Thanks!

I like the texture and shadow work on the snow there, nice

That's really eye-catching and the texture of the snow is terrific.

Difficult to control the highlights and stop the shadows from blocking out in bright light this scene was shot in. Softer lighting very early or late in the day would be better for approaching this scene.

Bravo! I absolutely love this!!! The shadowing, the curves, texture, slope - everything! Blow this sucker up for your wall!

In my opinion, this is good shot, but you could have masterpiece by isolating the snow and making an abstract pattern. I always think in terms of diplay, i.e. how that piece would look like printed and on the wall of the gallery ( large print), versus image on the web site

This one caught my eye.

 

I agree with Mario--an abstract might work better. The elements in the top don't fit perfectly with the foreground. If just a few of the tipping trees had been isolated against a clean background this would have worked better. The foreground is busy enough as is, but it needs something simple and solid to tie it together.

 

It's still a good photo and I like it very much.

I agree this is a good photograph and a remarkable scene I have revisited my original rating. I do like the idea of cropping to the drifts. But with number of brightly lit snow faces with blown out detail, I find my eye jumping to each of these distractions. Is there detail in these faces in the original? Since this was a digital shot, was it on a tripod, and did you take one where the histogram was not clipped at the white point? If so have you played with compositing to retain detail at both ends of the brightness scale?. In other words retaining the shadows you like and retaining detail in the white areas. I feel this image would be fantastic without the distraction of the blown highlights.

A vital ingredient in this image capture is the "length" of the shadows and their proportional relation to the burned-out white area. So I don't know that early-in-day or late-in-day shooting would be the answer. Perhaps shooting on a slight-cloudy overcast day would, thus retaining the shadow proportions. But then, did the photographer have that option? I get the impression from the mountain in the distance that this is shot from a very high mountain location, and maybe not one to which one could easily return another day. Or maybe the photographer actually resides up there! (;-)

An interesting question Kenneth, If it is difficult to get a better shot-does that justify a higher score? Personally, I don't think so. Perhaps I am quibling over a minor detail, but I think what makes this shot is the texture of the windblown topography. Would this be significantly improved by softer more tangential light? If you have an argument as to why this shot would not be improved by having info in the highlights rather than being posterized in those areas, please present it. The point after all is to improve our work-or am I off base?

From Mammoth eh? Do you know a Matt Clausen? He shoots skiing photos down there in the park. You may have seen him, he shoots an EOS A2.

Bravo - difficult conditions. Very nice shadows and texture but background is superfluous.