Behind the Scenes I - Forbidding Shadows

[FootLoose]

Taken "behind the scenes" of an outdoor music festival. C&C welcome.

Forbidding-Shadows_84A3997-1 by Greg, on Flickr

[Donald]

Yes, but .........

That whatever-it-is, little round thing in the centre is, I find, very distracting. It was the first thing that I saw. That may have been the intention. But I think the shadows are strong enough, particularly the shadow of the wide upright, to draw and hold attention. And does it need so much above where the shadows end? I've looked at it as a panorama and cropping just above where that little round thing is would give a pretty impressive image

Again, it's well seen. I feel a bit more thought about the composition would help it a lot.

[Shadowman]

I get distracted or fixated by patterns such as these all the time, it's just something that grabs your eye I suppose like a mandala, nice effort.

[DanK]

I agree with Donald: well seen, but the rivet in the middle is very distracting.

I tried three simple edits:

1. I removed the rivet

2. I cropped from the top and left. It seemed to me that removing some of the almost empty space from the top would emphasize the shapes more, and it sort of builds to the large pipe on the left.

3. I increased contrast.

Would something along these lines work?

[Urbanflyer]

Like the edit. Also would consider Donald's idea of making a more horizontal image--i.e., not cropping the sides. This might increase the repetition/variation theme going on. Not sure the increased contrast is needed. Nice eye!

[FootLoose]

Donald, John, Dan and Judith, thank you for commenting your feedback is appreciated.

Yes, but .........

That whatever-it-is, little round thing in the centre is, I find, very distracting. It was the first thing that I saw. That may have been the intention. But I think the shadows are strong enough, particularly the shadow of the wide upright, to draw and hold attention. And does it need so much above where the shadows end? I've looked at it as a panorama and cropping just above where that little round thing is would give a pretty impressive image

Again, it's well seen. I feel a bit more thought about the composition would help it a lot.

You've caught me out, Donald, I was being lazy. The tek screw bothered me too but I struggled to remove it satisfactorily because of the overlapping shadow and gave up in frustration. I have since returned to it though and removed it utterly.

The composition is based in geometry, obviously. If you divide the frame into four you can see each quadrant is different although each is composed of the same three elements (bars, shadow, wall). And beginning from the top right quadrant and moving anticlockwise the amount of light space in each quadrant diminishes as you move around the circle and each rectangle also appears to decrease in size proportionally as the shadow area increases (kind of a spiral effect).

There is also a clean square in the top right quadrant which establishes the pattern of striped rectangles. This is important because in every other quadrant the pattern is disrupted. So the frame establishes symmetry and disrupts it. I don't think cropping anything from the top would help the pattern of repetition with difference.


Dan, thanks for taking the time to illustrate your suggestions. I do experiment with cropping on images like this to discover what "forces" might be at play within them and once I find what I like I work to bring them out. There is nothing wrong with your crop but for me it makes the shadow the main subject and it doesn't preserve the symmetry/asymmetry that I like about it.

I kept the small pipe on the left because I felt that when I removed it the larger pipe acted too much like a framing device. The increased contrast does give the image a bit more pop, but it also makes the whites in the shadows blue-ish. Maybe that is just my monitor.

It works pretty well in black and white which gets past the blue shadow problem but this image is one of set and the other needs to be in colour, so colour it is.