There’s always another perspective

It has been a source of fascination that a given subject can be photographed by five different people and there will be five completely different shots. The same applies to a given location when a group of photographers visit it. The range of images made is so varied. The same can be said about post processing.

A good example occurred following a recent club evening photo walk. I have been trying to slow myself down working with the principle of less is more. It wasn’t the best of weather, which closed in after about an hour. As a result there were only two images that were really worth processing to any degree and one of those was verging on the mundane.

The better of the two, from my perspective, is entitled “Sea of Barley”. The strongish wind blowing enable me to make the image with an impression of movement using my 10 stop ND filter. The two tree tops gave the impression of two ships sailing along the horizon. A momentary shaft of of sunlight through the thinning cloud warm ed the composition and gave the barley a golden tinge. About two weeks later Gareth, a fellow member, saw the image on FlickR and suggested cropping the bottom third of the image. In his view this would bring the tree tops ( the ships ) into a stronger position within the composition. Having gone back and looked at it Gareth is right and this crop does make the image look stronger.

Gareth also commented that he was standing next to me as I made the shot and he didn’t see the composition.

Gareth’s view that my “Pointing the way” made the same evening rather ordinary. However, I could flip the image having the wire running right to left across the image. In this instance my approach was to try and lift the image from plain ordinary and decided to run it through my new Nik Silver Efex Pro 2 B&W conversion software. The end result really pleases me and the combination of Gareth’s critique and a little creativity on my part has completely changed the impact of this particular image.

In conclusion there is a huge benefit in having another pair of eyes appraise your image in a constructive manner. It makes sense to revisit an image and rework it in a different manner to try and lift it’s quality to another level.

A final thought is do different types of cameras create a significant variation for an identical composition? It is something I will experiment with over the next few weeks.

If you are interested in seeing more of my images these can be found on FlickR  http://www.flickr.com/photos/fidsworld/