C&C- Round Two...A few more attempts at decent monochromes.

[GreggS]

any feedback welcome!

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8. (this one's a re-working of a previously posted photo in the HDR section, based on the feedback I received)

 

[amolitor]

The windmills are fairly nice, but feel like background too me. They're too abstract, and not very visually dramatic. Mildly interesting, I would say, and technically fine.

The tools hanging on the wall are just odd to me. The frame feels slanted, although that might be the wall, and the relatively shallow depth of field doesn't seem to be serving any purpose. What are you isolating here? It feels like "some stuff in sharp, and some other stuff isn't" but so what? Are you trying to emphasize the shovel? The slantedness isn't enough to give the dynamic feel of a diagonal, and seems mostly to be leading my eye out of the frame. The tonal range is pretty flat, and the DoF is visually confusing, so there's nothing to engage my eye.

Railroad tracks is a bit cliched, but it was bold to throw the tracks themselves almost completely out of focus, sticking with the branch as the point of interest. I don't think the branch is interesting enough to carry the image in this case, but it's a good idea.

The tonemapped bridge is just ghastly. I hate tonemapping when it's overdone like this, so my opinion here should probably be ignored. Compositionally it's pretty dull, none of your DoF games are in play here, so it's just a fully centered fully sharp picture of a covered bridge.

The bucket with water is very strong, I like it the best by a wide margin. Not sure why, entirely. The DoD is working with you here, isolating the foreground textures, which are great. The contrast of the water surface and the bucket is great stuff. The background is fully blurred out, so you get a vague sense of context without being bothered by it - no visual confusion here, we know exactly what we're supposed to be looking at, and what we're supposed to be looking at is interesting and rewarding.

The chairs is quite strong. It gives a nice evocative sense of "street cafe, maybe in Paris!" to me. Not sure I love the foreground chair out of focus, it's slightly confusing to find where the focus IS, but that's a quibble.

The empty bucket isn't nearly as interesting as the one with water, probably because you don't have the contrasting texture, and there's less abstraction -- it's clear we're supposed to be looking at the place where the bail attaches to the bucket, but that's just not particularly interesting to my eye.