TWISTER!

hi jeff,

 

what a great subject. i LOVE stuff like this, and, as a resident if birmingham, alabama, i'm always jealous of people who have easy access to desert, which is the most photographable type of landscape on earth.

 

i'm very impressed with the amount of detail your digital camera captured. i don't to any digital *picture-taking*, so some of my comments below may not be germain. please take them with as many grains of salt as necessary. i'm assuming you manipulated this image with photoshop, which is good.

 

the first thing i would do is crop this image differently. i'm a fan of square cropping, the good old 1:1 medium format aspect ratio. i might crop it square so that only the central knot is visible. having said that, i would add that i also like extremely wide 2.35:1 panavision-style cropping, which might look really nice with this image because it has such a strong horizontal quality. i find the empty area both above and below the piece of wood a bit distracting.

 

compositionally, i might try--and this could be difficult without going all the way out to the desert again--to skew the image more diagonally. it's a bit static and overly horizontal--horizontality is also one of this image's strong points. giving it a strong diagonal aspect might really make it more dynamic.

 

i would also suggest some dodging and burning. as a rule--in my opinion, of course--the corners of images almost always need burning in. (of course, it's always best to break rules when you can.) i might also burn in the curved highlight area about 1/3 of the way in from the left-hand side. i'd also suggest dodging the shadow on the right-hand side just a little bit.

 

the rest of your portfolio is very impressive, especially "angel," which is the kind of image that gives me a pang of envy: i wish i'd taken it. it's just an incredible image. "trimetro" and "tumor" are also very, very good. "fossil" is impressive. i'm glad to see i'm not the only photographer who likes to take pictures of dead animals.

 

anyhow, thanks very much for sharing these images. they're very impressive and inspirational to us all. i'm glad to see others doing such impressive work with digital cameras.

 

best,

brad daly

 

 

Nice shot Jeff - have seen alot of your shots on Photocritique - glad to see some variety - (not that you don't have some great panoramic shots)- the light seems alittle bright in this one - I think more subdued lighting particularly for B&W allows for more expression of details - Regards

Contrast, how I love to see good use of contrast - superb

Good shot. I like B&W pictures. I think that smaller grains of surrounding space would put more emphasis on central object. Best regards.

Found this at Box Canyon, near the Salton Sea, Southern CA. Kodak

DC280 Digital.

Hi Jeff,

I love the texture and details on this one also, I haven't see it before.

A worthy subject. You may want to try some different angles.

So b&w CAN be done well with digital. I think this is my favourite but I'll be back for more tips. Lovely work!!!

Good shapes, textures, lines. I would crop it and take out rather featureless BG - will upload example.

Bristlecone pine??? Nice use of contrast and detail.