Alien Mask

Thanks for rating and comments.

I've got to say it looks like a bit more than a mask. This is wonderfully dramatic; where were you? There is so much detail keeping me fascinated. Great Eye!

Perhaps a really tight crop would look good too.

I agree, a tight crop would be fantastic and would bring us in even more. Lets see it!

Great composition and contrast!

Do you mean like this ? Thanks for advice and appreciation. Greetings from Rome.

I was thinking that this piece would work well in a portrait format since it seems to have a lot of vertical movement. I hope you don't mind, but I took the liberty of making a crop like this. I thought including the hands might be interesting, but now I can't decide which of the three I like best.

Kelly, I join just above the entire original photo: as you can see there's a lot of vertical movement to exploit, and for a long time I was not decided about if and how to crop the image. I finally decided to crop it cutting legs and concentrating attention on face, including red feathers, visage, second mask and hands. Being not willing to loose the circular framing of wings, I eventually included in the image large portion of distracting elements, so your remark is correct. On the other hand someone could prefer an horizontal cropping, including wings face and second mask, or even a circular darkening and defocusing centered on face. Perhaps the truth is that when a shot is casually so rich of interesting and attracting elements, cropping is not simple at all and depends uniquely on personal preference. Who really deserves our appreciation is the person that invented and weared this mask during last Venice Carnival. Ciao.

I agree that with so much that is fantastic it is hard to know how to crop this or if to crop it at all. It is wonderful to see the full image. I continue to be impressed with your whole collection of images from the carnival.