Wooden Fencing

[Donald]

Just off for my annual weekend in a cottage on the shores of Loch Lomond. Weather meant to be awful tomorrow (Saturday), which makes for the sort of scnes that I want to photograph. So looking forward to it.

In the meantime, here's another one from my recent few days on the island of Gigha. Every now and again we get a question or have a discussion about landscape photography and that old chestnut that you need lenses at the wider end rather than the long end for this type of photography. And some of us always suggest that long lens landscape photography is not only fun, but brings a different perspective (excuse the pun) to the genre.

Well, I quite like this one. It wouldn't have been possible without a long lens. What do you think? the one weakness I think it has (you may think there are a lot more) is that the sky is very monotone. A bit of variation might have helped?

As I was walking along the beach early in the morning, the sun was coming up and it started to hit that wooden fence.

Is the fence too centred?


40D, Sigma 120-400 F4.5-5.6 APO DG OS @ 171mm. ISO100. 1/45@f16.

Click on it to view it in the Lightbox

[Jos G]

I agree to the points you bring to question.
If I had made this photo, the fence would probably be more to the left. But it might be to the right too, I don't know what's there!
As for the sky, it takes a little too much space. Either I 'd lower the camera or crop it for about 1/4 of it's present volume.
The first thing that came to my attention was actually the sky, because of it's quite dark appearance. This brings the question to me what a colour-filter would do? And even a gradient filter (the ones you can slide up and down, that is)
The strange thing is that it works quite different when viewed at full size in the lightbox. The sky does not seem that pronounded, yet it does 'feel' odd. The good thing to the darker appearence of it is that the sun's reflection on the fence gets more attention, which works well to me. Still I keep wondering what a little tilt of the camera would have done. Have you not taken a second shot of this scene? (I am so curious!)

[John 2]

There is a little too much sky Donald but the main problem is that it tends to merge with the horizon and there is a consequent lack of depth. A possibility might be that by moving the fence to the right and including more of the interesting FG to the left plus more of the headland in the distance would compensate for this. However, easy to say but not easy to see at the time I suspect.

[Geoff F]

Obviously you don't want to lose anything from the left, Donald, but you could probably crop off a bit from the right in order to reduce the sky area.

That would tend to centre the fence a little more but I think as there are so many other items in the scene it wouldn't matter too much.

[Dave Humphries]

Is the fence too centred?

For me yes, I played about with alternate crops by re-positioning the Litebox, what looked right to me was to lose everything to right of the second wire fence post, leaving an image about 1100 (from left) x 900.

This resulted in the fence and the island balancing the composition.

If you wanted to retain the landscape aspect ratio, you could lose some sky.

HTH - but bear in mind I am no landscape shooter

[Ken Curtis]

Hi Donald.

Yes, I think cropping would make for a better image. The sky does not contain much information, and the more interesting part of the photo to me is the lower left. Here is a possible crop for your consideration.

[Donald]

Thank you all. Just back from my weekend away and am uploading the files from the card onto computer.

Thank you for your various suggestions. I'll go back and start looking at re-working this one.