PierA, Liberty and NYC Harbor

HDR photo of the pier at Battery Park, with the statue of liberty in the

distance

Very original! lovely work.

I'll always encourage a person to follow his/her dream and vision.  But for the life of me, I can't understand this photo, especially the severe tilt.  I don't know what the photographer intends to say or what is being conveyed to the viewer.  I'm just at a complete loss.  Yes, it's different.  Is being different sufficient to the extent that if it's different, nothing else matters?

That's an excellent question; and thank you for the honest thought. I guess I should have explained what I was aiming for. Better late than never, I say, so here goes.

"Beauty lies in the eyes of the beholder" is the adage that I'm trying to address with this photo. This exquisite pier, more than a 100 years old, is right down in NYC's famous Battery Park. Battery Park is also the ferry stop for tourists heading to see the Statue of Liberty. Thousands of people queue up every day to ride the ferry and the queues snake right by this old pier. Unfortunately, the pier hardly draws a glance from the tourists. But to me, the beauty that this dilapidated structure has to offer is infinitely more than lady Liberty herself. This photo brings the pier into focus and renders the statue into the far corners, literally. Now would I have been able to capture that without the severe tilt? Perhaps, but probably not without such dramatic results, in my humble opinion. Hope this explains what I was going for. In any case, please keep the feedback coming - this is excellent stuff ;-)

Anand, you make an excellent point.  Unless the photographer explicitly states why a photo was taken in a certain way, a viewer has ho way to judge the photo except by his/her own standards.  I just do straight landscapes, and your photo is far removed from the kind of photography I do every day.  So you can understand why I'm left scratching my head.  I once commented on an ordinary photograph that I thought was much too dark.  But the photographer responded that he was so captivated by the darkness of the landscape he was walking through.  In that sense, I think he captured the photo perfectly -- it accurately reflected his experience.

So my amended comment to your photo would be that I think the relative proximity of the two structures is very appropriate, and the colors that have been applied to the pier really enhance its personality in the manner for which you are striving.  I'm less sure about the angle of the camera.  I'd be content with the prominence of the pier and its enhanced colors.  The angle just makes it more difficult for me to view the entire photograph (keep in mind, however, that I have 60-year-old, very traditional eyes).  I would want to compare this photo with the same photo having a straight horizon, and then ask which orientation best expresses your point of view about the relative importance of the pier and your interest in it.

(BTW, my son is 30 and regularly angles the camera when taking indoor shots of people.  He and I have spirited discussions of the reasons for and wisdom of doing this, and we never agree.  Perhaps it's just a generational thing, in much the same way as family portraits used to be stiff and posed as opposed to more spontaneous and informal settings of many family portraits today.)