What is wrong with this?

I am having trouble pinpointing all that is wrong with this. Help?



ISO 640, f/6.4, 1/200.

Rachel Foster said:

I am having trouble pinpointing all that is wrong with this. Help?

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The sky is not interesting, the buildings are not vertical. I don't know what it's for!

Rachel, you have omitted your goals, wishes, intent or purpose; just that it doesn't appear to work! No impression of how it is coming short, because you may not have even defined what you were after in the first place. If you don't know, then either make up your mind, don't take the picture, or get full coverage and look at the images at home. I will often do the latter when I'm with other folks who didn't want to stop in the first space. Use the same exposure, overlap as if to stitch and put it off till you are home. I'd rather have that leeway than a hasty grabshot with disappointing composition.

Let's say we know these points, now with this in mind, Rachel, your success now depends on whether or not your ideas was sound, how much and the quality of data you have to play with in your files and if you have any adjacent views with the same exposure. I'd imagine that twice as wide would have captured more of the sky and space to balance the detail on the left, (but it could have been ugly)!

Could we make something interesting. Perhaps, but what's the motivation first of all and is this the best of what you shot? Is this already processed?

Asher

My goals were to capture the breathtaking sunset before me, no more no less. It's hard to articulate that. Sometimes, I see a scene that is just exquisitely lovely but I cannot make the camera capture what i see.

The sky had me transfixed: The colors and the patterns. But I'm not sharp enough, my eye is not well-enough developed to isolate/pinpoint what exactly that was. That's why I'm at a loss. This image seems to have some of the elements that drew me, but I can NOT identify what.

It was a stunning sunset. There's too much dreck in there detracting from it but I'm stumped.

I have a number of shots, but this felt closest. And it's pretty much out-of-cam. I don't know where to go with it.

Sorry Rachel,

Great sunsets occur every day and while we enjoy them with our senses, our camera does not hear the wind or the birds and feel the coldness of the night coming on as the light changes before our eyes. The camera just sees a limited angle and dynamic range, and just one set of the light, which to your eyes are dynamic and altered before you. I could say straighten the picture and crop away most of the hardly interesting blue sky and you will be left with a picture that would sell at a resort/ sand festival if you had a booth. But so what? That's not what you saw, felt or wanted!

• What was the beginning and end of the entire scene that impressed you that night? Is it all in your shot?
  
  
• You set to ISO 640 and f4.0? Why not stop down to f8 then you don't have to worry about focus accuracy. With the 5DII you can we easily go to 1600. You want to have detail where there is detail so you want a small aperture and a reasonably fast shutter speed.
  
  
• I'd have bracketed + and - 1 (and even 2 ev) to get detail in the buildings and the sky. You can decide to use that or not later. So that would mean exposing for the buildings. Then, under exposefor the sky, so it might be more interesting and put the layers in photoshop, one on top of the other and use portions of each as you desire by masking. Or else you can use HDR in photoshop under File-Automate to blend the 3 images.

Don't worry if this doesn't work, this once! Worry if, after 25 such new attempts, you're getting nowhere!

Asher

Did you happen to take anything to the right of this frame?

I'll post wider shots tomorrow. Thanks.

I KNOW there was something special in this one, I'm just not good enough yet to pinpoint it.

There's nice texture - love the color. But as I sit here with a disk drive full of sunsets with the same issue I find it fair to say that a sunset in of and by it's self offers nothing to hold the viewer untill there is a real focal point. The sun is a light source and rarely makes the best subject.

May I suggest?
Change the lens for very wide one!
Sunset viewing is 180°, so to speak, when one is in nature…

Or else use a very long focal to get the colors and texture of the sky thru the details of a branch or the side of a roof top, or a telegraph pole or whatever that connect earth to that sky…

My 0.2 cts (and, yes, of Euro…; -)

I've got it....There must be something in the image that can stand alone. The sunset can only accent, not carry the image.

Rachel; You've already received some productive suggestions from Asher and Nicolas, and you've reached a revelation of your own. So I don't know that I can offer much more. But here are my off-the-cuff thoughts on this image.

Colorful sunsets can elicit emotional responses from everyone. Rather like aurora borealis displays they're ephemeral, they're dazzling, and they're bigger than life. They prompt us to contemplate our smallness within the universe for just a few moments. So it's natural to try to bottle and share such a remarkable experience with a camera. (Many years ago (late 1960's?) I read a remark from a senior marketing exec at Kodak along the lines of, "Sunsets and kids account for 70% of our color film sales.".)

The problem is that such experiences don't bottle well. Like a long-opened carbonated beverage, these experiences somehow lose their fizz in the sharing, even the best such images. It's natural to wonder why and for photographers to blame their skills for such letdowns.

But the fact is that there's nothing really "wrong" with your photograph at all. It disappoints you because it's only a photograph. You cannot contain and share a human experience as broad and emotionally deep as a brilliant sunset in a little rectangle, any more than you could share the Pacific Ocean in a gallon jug. It's an experience in which you were immersed, not simply a viewer. That's why so much landscape photography, however colorful and skillfully recorded, is howlingly boring. Beholding something like the Grand Canyon is a far bigger experience than any lens could ever capture. ("You ain' got dat lens."

So your revelation may put you on track to create new types of images using such experiential scenes. One of the most significant suggestions I ever received along these lines came very casually from the mouth of a very accomplished photojournalist. He said, "Whenever I see a great landscape scene I search for something interesting to put in front of it.". That principal has served me very well for a long time.

Ken, you've brilliantly stated what I've been groping toward. And I think that's why my scenics have been such spectacular failures. I shoot emotion. I become entirely immersed in the emotion...the camera does not. So, now I must find a symbol for that emotion that the camera can use in an attempt to communicate what I'm trying to capture.

It's as if I'm giving the camera a message to deliver but I'm not giving it the language with which to communicate. I'm telling the camera "Say this," but I'm not giving it any "words."

Here, the words are the water (Mike Shimwell). Here, the words are the clouds and the tree (Cem). Here, the ice (Tom Robbins)

http://www.openphotographyforums.com/forums/showthread.php?t=8019.


Mine? To switch (and torture) metaphors, I've put the singer on stage, dressed her in her finery, but when she tries to sing, no sounds emerge and she stands there with her mouth open.

Asher has commented in the past that my portraits are far better than my scenics. This might be why.

Holy crap, I think I'm having an epiphany. I've got goosebumps.

Rachel Foster said:

Holy crap, I think I'm having an epiphany. I've got goosebumps.

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Rachel, Rachel, Rachel, not in front of everyone! Maybe you ordered in what Sally ate here? LOL

I'm happy for you! Recover, wash you face and get your wide angle lens and back to the sunset!

Haaaaaaaaaaa! Made me laugh.

May be a crop?

Rachel Foster said:

I am having trouble pinpointing all that is wrong with this. Help?

ISO 640, f/6.4, 1/200.

Click to expand...

What about cropping the image, like a wide screen format, like a panoramic picture. If you have CS4, you have Content Aware Scaling in order to crop the image and elarge it without distortion. I fee like all goes horizontal here, there is too much room in the sky without being used. The interesting point, in my opinion, is in the buildng and the sky behind with some of the sky above of the building what matters most.

Just my opinion.

Have a nice day

Leo

Thanks, Leo. That's worth a try.

Last night I went for a walk at sunset and found nothing to press the shutter for. Having a clearer idea of what an image needs (the "language" thing) I have a new way of approaching composition. There is a church about 5 miles out in the country. It's a lovely stone construction with no buildings behind it. I think THAT shot with the sunset colors might actually be worth seeing.

Viewing a scene in person is vastly different from viewing an image. In person, we bring to the situation all of our past experiences and associations sparked by one small element or combination of elements. The image does not do that and so the composition must compensate for that.

I'm not saying this well, but I finally get it.