Creating from Natural Elements of Form.
Hello Janet; I have also worked on similar compositions using plants, grasses, and other natural stuff so I like your direction and encourage you to pursue it. This particular image, to my eye is not as strong and image as I suspect that scene could provide you. Your color contrasts and exposure are ok, although you'll want to experiment a bit more. I very much like the back-handed diagonal striations that the out-of-focus foreground weeds create although it somewhat overwhelms the right half of the image. Color contrasts can be critical in guiding the eye through these types of images. And, of course, FORM selection and definition is alway critical, as the eye wants to immediately inventory familiar forms.
But what I think needs reworking/reshooting here is the mixture of sharp and dull focus. In my experience, and again to my eye, If anything is near crisp focus you have to let the eye resolve it completely. Otherwise it makes the entire scene look like a mistake or dud. Specifically, that dry flower top in the upper right of the image is partially obscured and makes the entire scene appear more accidental than intentional.
Hi Ken,
Your input is valuable. You have covered form, color contrast, composition, your "inventory of familiar things" and importantly the reference we have to some area that's well defined.
This latter issue a
very very good to emphasize. We do instantly compare with reference to what is sharply in focus if it's there at all. Before anything is processed on a higher level there are extraordinarily fast circuits trying to filter meaning in all the many points of interest to find what might be relevant to survival: danger or food.
When we use this, we can get the viewer's eye to follow where we want immediately and get them involved. That's why I suggested having one defined layer before building the "moved" or "moving" layer either stuccato or with an extension of the in focus stem or seed that's motion blurred in the picture, or by post processing. I don't know one can do this without one area that is sharply focussed.
Perhaps having a rock or a tree trunk could allow one to use only blurred leaves and seeds?
Pay special attention to focus and contrasts. Forget WHAT you're shooting and just look at the viewfinder image as a painting.
That you have done well in the pictures you kindly share:
These images can be used as great references to what
might be obtainable by observing not just the
identities of what's there but
what the whole matter constitutes as an experience, for that's all there will be recorded, a painting. These pictures are significant in the use of shape, pattern, texture, position of elements and color palettes of nature that are so agreeable and give us as sense of harmony.
Looking at these elements, the gestalt and not, as you say the identities, I'm reminded of plein air and Monet and how he used form, colors, textures and especially a deep study of, (and investment in), seasonal and angled lighting to create his, what I'd coin, "
a singular unit of being". This is an experience that does not need the rest of the world for that time one looks at it.
So yes, I ask the reader to take a great step, a leap in which we might use as elements the kind that Ken's forms represent, but with thicker strokes and add color and special lighting to get one specially unique experience. It's a bold idea, but this is what I am thinking:
Claude Monet Wheatstacks (End of Summer)
1890-91; Oil on canvas, 60 x 100 cm; The Art Institute of Chicago
Source is from the ibiblio.com website here.