Bottoms

[Mike Buckley]

Bottoms of wine bottles. C&C encouraged as always, though I have nothing to ask.

[Donald]

Mike

I'm finding the tones in the second one not so attractive. I think it's because it's tending towards a darkness at the bottom and is very bright at the top. Whereas the first one has, for me, more harmonious tone across the picture. I also like that composition very much.

Wonderfully imaginative stuff.

[Mike Buckley]

Thanks for your thoughts, Donald. Like you, I also have qualms about the second one for the same reason that you mention and haven't decided about it. I'm stretching myself beyond the normal glass stuff that I have been doing, partly because the subject has a concave shape and lots of detail that present all sorts of other issues that I'm not used to handling.

[Mike Buckley]

Now that it has been a day since I worked with the second photo, I've been trying to pin down exactly why I don't respond emotionally as favorably to it as the first photo. It's not that the upper area has bright tones and the bottom area has dark tones, as I initially thought. I now realize that those tones are not much different from the tones in the first photo.

I think instead that the second photo is less appealing because it's simply too busy. Unlike the first photo, which has a plain background and tabletop separated only by a relatively weak horizon, the second photo is full of circles and undulating shapes of dark and bright tones with no plain areas to frame the busier parts of the glass.

Your thoughts?