Shadow Lake

Yes/no/maybe?

yes, but with some more scrint tinkering perhaps? foreground's pretttty interesting with those dead fallen trunks, but it's kinda hard to sustain this interest throughout the frame, especially all the way into the depth of the scene into the bg. i'm just talking out of my hat here, but perhaps the shadows can get thicker in the bg, and also making the fg a bit more emphatic than it is, as that's where i find interest in the scene, and maybe a bit more of color saturation too. did i just say more color? time to hit the sack..

John, I think this scene would have also benefited from a warming filter along with your polarizer. I think it is lacking "punch" due to lack of color. This is probably how the scene appeared, since you are in autumn season there, but I think bumping up the saturation and perhaps some tonality or darkening would really help this out. Compositionally, I do find it pleasing, with great detail and depth.

Yes, your Linhof Super Technika doesn't record (almost) square images. So, you must have cropped off a particular part of the original slide. My guess is that you eliminated the (featureless?) sky from the top. balaji is right about the scrint tinkering, imo... This would look better if it was just a tad darker (on my screen).

a slight lsd version of shadow lake with a lot of shadows.

after proving my color-blindedness, further vandalizing..

balaj's second looks best to me. The subject, the logs, have little color to begin with.

Got to agree this looks a little flat.I tried a straight 25 in satutation & it did wonders for the impression of depth in the shot.I love the subject & composition.I took some similar shots at Lake St. Clair but the contrast was so high that they will never see the light of day again!Thanks for showing how it should be done.Pete.

Thank you all very much for your help. Gotta rush, so I'll just quickly say I like Pete's version the best for now. Thanks again everyone.

As Peter guessed, the sky is included on the transparency. I did this walk for a short article I have to write for a magazine, and the light was so uninspiring that I only exposed 4 colour sheets for the whole day, and 6 black and whites, 4 of which were the same scenes as the colour pictures, so I really only took 6 pictures for a whole-day shoot (including the star-trail grab). As the walk I have to profile for the article is the Shadow Lake Circuit, I thought I'd better at least take one picture of the lake. It has tangled scrub right to the edge all the way around except for this section, so access points were very limited. It was quite a difficult exposure, placing the polariser at the right angle, and compensating for it were tricky. I was pleased that I nailed the exposure, and thought it was a workman-like record image that might be good enough to illustrate the lake for the article, without being a blinder.

I wasn't intending to post this one to photo.net, but when I showed it to Matt on the light box, he immediately came up with the idea of chopping off the skyline and drab grey sky, to bring the interest back to the lake. Still unsure of it's merit, I thought I'd give it a run here, and I'm very appreciative of the feedback. This is basically as it came out of the scanner, no tweaking at all. I'm certainly open to the idea of sliding the saturation up a bit.

After a fashion, I am reminded of this picture by x c coyote. Largely because of the use of tree trunks to break up the lake surface and of course the decision to eliminate the sky. Again, as with coyote's, I am drawn to the area of whiteness that the branches lead towards and especially to the bulbous tree trunk in the extreme lower right. I think removing the bulbous lump helps keep the eye in the picture. I don't mind the centre whiteness really once the lower right corner's been dealt with. I also agree with Peter Nixon that the picture could do with a shot of colour enrichment. I've given it some generally and then a blast of yellow over the tree tops and a blast of red in the foreground aquatic material.

Excellent Phil,

 

all it needs now is to be run through the Burgess auto-reducto-squarization process:

Doug, shouldn't that be the Burgess auto-reducto-monochroming-squarization process? :)

John, which magazine are we going to find this in? I think we would all like a copy, by this stage...

Doug and Balaji, you monochrome fiends, I added a red filter to this set-up for the negative, for extra punchy contrast. I haven't had a play with it yet.

Phil, your tweak looks about as good as we're going to get with this one I think.

 

Pete, Outdoors Australia. I did a Walk Profile of Freycinet Peninsula for them last year. This will be my second.

 

Thanks again everyone.

Outdoors Australia, that's great! If you haven't already, I would like to see your work appear on the frontpage of this publication...

I've been on the inside pages of Wild a couple of times, but not the cover. Thanks Pete.