Colorful Sailboat on Puget Sound

A friend who is a sailing enthusiast took me out on his boat. It give a

whole different perspective than photographing from land.

Jerry,

it very well may be that the perspective is different, but you were far too close and cut off a good portion of the mast.

The whole scene is pretty static for a sailboat, judging from the absent waves and from the behaviour of the boat, there was no wind.

Also the tones are flat from high sun.

Reply to Luca,

It is funny to me that I find fault with photos on these pages when people cut off the tops of the heads of their portraits, yet it bothers me not at all when I cut off the top of a sailboat mast.

 What does bother me Luca, is that you seem to subscribe to a given set of criteria about sailboat pictures.  They either must conform to it or you will list their mistakes on the blackboard, like a boring teacher who cannot see any but one way for the lesson to go.

I hoped to suggest by my title that it is color that this picture is about.  The color is both in the sail and in the reflection.  Yet you did not talk about color at all.  You did not mention composition, color saturation, exposure, tonality or any other photographic conditions. You state on your profile that you know little about photography.  May I suggest the first step is to open your eyes and see.

As far as being too close I, as photographer, had absolutely no control over the position of the two boats. The two skippers were only interested in avoiding any collision and yielding right of way.  You might have noticed that the composition is lopsided - that is - all the color that jumps out at us is on the far left of the picture. In the split second that I had to compose this I decided that the color of the left side set up an unbalanced situation that complimented feeling of inherent power with which the boat might at any moment use to speed up and be on its way.

Next time pay attention to picture elements and less upon the vehicle photographed.

Jerry

Jerry,

First of all I do not have criteria about photographing sailboats, nor am I a teacher putting marks on a blackboard. I have just an aesthetic perception, some experience in viewing photos, some in photographing and a feeling for the visual message.

You are posting images for critique here, and that's what I'm doing. If you don't want to be critiqued, it's very simple: don't post for critique.

1. A picture should not need a title. It's a typically visual medium and as such it should not require words, any word;
2. There might be a general rule about cropping and cutting subjects on photos. A photographer has also the possibility to decide cropping parts for the purpose of the visual message he or she wants to transmit. My opinion is: there are rules, but they are there to be broken. But the photographer must know why and how and the careful viewer (I'm a careful viewer) should understand why, or at least whether the crop has a bearing on the visual message of the photo, or not;
3. This subject - the sailboat - is as static as can be (I have sailed boats and photographed boats). There is no feeling at all of what you call "inherent power". There is not even some "room" in front of the boat to give some feeling of motion, no panning, no blurring. Just a "frozen" boat, without even a wave at her bow;
4. There are also very appealing static pictures of sailboats - they can be wonderful that way - but this is not the case here, also because you clip the upper part of the mast and because of the cluttered background;
5. The colours of the genoa sail cannot make the photo alone, the sun must have been quite high at that time (as shown by the amount of light reflected by the vegetation in the background as well as by the white sailcovers and the sunshade) and the height of the sun renders quite flat tones.

I greatly value your suggestion to better consider picture elements. I will definitely do that.

My suggestion would be that you consider whether this photo looks like an imperfectly composed and processed postcard.

Luca