Glacier National Park Flower

I took this photograph this past June out in Glacier National Park. I was at an area called Sun Point and I thought the little yellow flower against the backdrop of the mountains was attractive. What do folks like or dislike about the photograph?



Thanks

Joe Russo said:

I What do folks like or dislike about the photograph?

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Hi Joe,

You asked for it. <friendly smile from an honest but constructive critic>

The shot is a nice snapshot. Why?

• There is a distracting white hotspot at the base of the log directly below the yellow blooms.
• The snowfields and glaciers are in general overexposed with no detail. This can be fixed digitally to some degree with the additional of noise to imagineer a sensation of texture.
• The image would very likely be sharper at f/11 to f/14 and you could have dropped the resulting ISO below 1600 which would yield more image detail. Unless you really want the DoF, f/22 simply tends to kick in diffraction induced blurring and can reduce the impact of a shot (where more DoF isolation might have made the yellow bloom more prominent). At a 40 mm focal length you simply do not need a 1/500 second shutter speed for handholding (unless you drink more coffee than I do and I drink a lot) which also would let you drop the ISO.
• While the bare branched tree at right is neat, it distracts from the blooms and makes me question why it is in the shot as it is out of focus anyway.
• The yellow blooms look oversaturated and do not show much detail. Selective desaturation of the most saturated areas can help a lot with this type of thing.
• The light is more likely to be softer earlier in the morning or late in the day rather than so close to noon. Fill flash or a reflector could have softened the shadows some.

What I do like:

• The collection of elements is interesting and has potential.
• I like the way the in focus blades of grass at right camouflage the bare branched tree and partly hide it.
• The mountain scenery. It looks like a lovely spot.

Anyway, these are some critical thoughts and hopefully you find them constructive. Please feel free to ask me to expand on any point. The suggestion of fill light, selective desaturation, and fixing the blown highlights can all be done in post and I will expand on that if you would like.

enjoy,

Sean <smile>

Joe, that is a stunnig site and as such more difficult to photograph than something less wonderful. There's an over abundance of beauty and what do we look at.

Sean's approach is good. See what is needed in the picture and where you want it.

When the senses are overwhelmed like this, one needs perhpas to have a sketch pad and add simple marks to locate where things might be. just the sweep of things. Locate main features. Now ask what should not be there?

Photography requires exclusion. This is done by hunting for your viewpoint, just like a lion positions itself for the kill. Everything is really defined by that exact position and timing.

I do feel that most of the foreground is not needed. But we are stuck by the position of the flower relative to the mountains and slopes.

More detail in the snow caps might not help since there's no detail in the trees on the hillside either.

If the subject is the flower, it should be bigger.

I don't mind the snow caps being blurred, maybe that would be better.

This is a challenge which Ansel Adams might not take up with a view camera.

Anyway, I value this post and Sean your critique is well thought out and generous. I like your analysis.

Are there any other images in this shoot? Sometimes, another image in the gallery has more potential than the one we first choose!

Asher



for spelling

Sean,

Thanks for that critique. It is just the kind of thing that I'm looking for. I hope you don't mind if I address each of your points one by one.

The blossoms are essentially dead center in the image with no apparent thought to their placement against the background

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Do you think it would have worked better with a lower camera position so that the blossoms were more on top of the prominent mountain in the background? Do you think that would that help to remove the blending of lines that you describe?

There is a distracting white hotspot at the base of the log directly below the yellow blooms.

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Agreed. I don't remember seeing there when I was making the image. Note to self: Pay more attention! ;-)

The snowfields and glaciers are in general overexposed with no detail.

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I suppose I could've handled this with multiple exposures and some digital blending after the fact although see my response to your next point.

The image would very likely be sharper at f/11 to f/14 and you could have dropped the resulting ISO below 1600 which would yield more image detail.

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I was trying to maximize the DoF here hoping to get both the blossoms and the mountains in focus. If I could have I probably should've used a longer focal length and stepped back from the flower but the location pretty much prohibited that. There wasn't much land behind me. As for the shutter speed/ISO. I was trying to keep the shutter speed up because it was a windy day and the flower blossoms were all over the place. I had done an exposure at ISO 800 for 1/250 and the flower looked blurred on the camera preview screen making me believe that I need a faster shutter speed.

While the bare branched tree at right is neat, it distracts from the blooms and makes me question why it is in the shot as it is out of focus anyway.

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This is an area that I need to work on more - what NOT to include.

The yellow blooms look oversaturated and do not show much detail.

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Hmm. I didn't do anything in particular to the blooms to bump up the saturation. That may have resulted when I did an over contrast adjustment. If I were to selectively desaturate as you suggest, do you think it would have the effect of giving the blooms equal weight (visually) as the other subjects in the image? My intent when I was making this image was to emphasize the blooms as the main subject.

The light is more likely to be softer earlier in the morning or late in the day rather than so close to noon.

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Yes those times of the day are much better for photographing with soft light. This image was actually made closer to 10 am as opposed to noon as indicated by the EXIF data. The problem there was that I forget to reset the time on my camera. I live on the East Coast and Montana/Glacier Nat'l Park is two hours behind us. Hence EXIF = 12:00, Actual = 10:00. But I still agree that maybe earlier in the day would have a different, softer, and possibly more interesting quality of light.

Sean - thanks for the thoughtful and helpful critique. If you've never been to Glacier National Park I highly recommend it. It's nickname is the Crown of the Continent and it hold up to that moniker well. It's an absolute beautiful national park and well worth any photographer's time to visit and make some images.

Asher,

Thanks for your comments. Glacier NP really is a spectacular place. And I didn't even get to hike into the back country much which I understand is, as you put it, stunning.

I've read about your idea about using a sketch pad in other places. I probably should give it a try although I generally don't think about packing one when travelling.

Do you think that a crop up from the bottom would eliminate a busy foreground but still give enough sense of a foreground/background combination?

I do have some other images from this trip. Here is one taken of Wild Goose Island:



BTW - Thanks for correcting the link to the flower picture

Hi Joe,

I like the colour, I like the seed heads, the foreground, the scenary, the subject as a whole, I'm hoping you have more photos of the region. However The composition is sort of distracting. When you see that in real life, you will be looking probably at the flower, the background will be blurred, or vice versa. I think it would work better with the flower in the lake area, its outline would pop more than with the various textures of the mountains and trees. Maybe some ps to blur away the bits that are not the eyes point of focus. Now, wrt cropping, again, this is how you may want to try, I can't give a definite answer, but I would try rotating so the distant shore was horizontal, but that may not work, save it as a copy, of course ;-). Then use a couple of bits of paper, slide over your screen, see how the impact changes. It works for me if I crop the blue sky away, the top 1/4 inch of the central mountain goes, doesn't matter, its the flower we like....
cropping the bottom, up to about a 1/4 inch of the shore (or is it a log) (n.b. - re. the rotate, it may work better if the near shore was kept horizontal. My feeling is, I would liked to have moved to the right slightly, so the flower was to the left, over the distant fir trees. Possibly forward, so the grass on the rhs, was still there, but that was not your question.

In my book, there is nothing wrong with you cutting out the flower in photoshop, whatever, and putting it elsewhere. It is the eco friendly way. It only grew there, because that is where a seed settled, a pretty random event, but random is pretty too;-)

fwiw, I have not read the other posts here, this is my thoughts, 'cos you asked. Thanks for exercising my cells.

Best wishes,

Ray

ps. maybe even crop the sky to just above the central mountain snow line.
pps this refers to your first image, you posted your second while I was scribing this, I guess - one thing at a time ;-) ;-0

Hi Ray,

Thanks for looking and your comments.

You know...until you mentioned it I hadn't noticed that the far shore line was not level across. I'll have to try rotating as you suggested.

As for cropping this is already cropped from the original...there was much more sky in the original. I can try to bring this down even more to see how it looks.

I like your idea of moving the flowers down into the lake. I'll have to remember that composition tip for future images of this type.

Thanks again!