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Composition thoughts

It feels rather awkward to my eyes.
It's unbalanced. My mind thinks there is good stuff to the right that's been cut off (not that there actually is).
The rock on the right feels like a person cut at a joint. The whole scene makes me want to pan to the right.

The rocks on the left, point to the left, and try to keep me there. The empty space between the two "subjects" does nothing to bring them together.

I like the colors though. They make me feel like a muggy summer evening, after a rain.

I attached a crop that I think works better...YMMV.



$image.webp
 
I like BitterJeweller's crop. Your first image makes me want to step to the left and turn my shoulder to get rid of the rock to the right. OR kneel down and have a lower perspective. Or both.

I do love the colours, also.
 
Hmm - good points.

I think I need to work on composition - I've heard that a fair amount, and with each constructive criticism, I think I'm slowly improving.

I'll look at the original image and see what I can get to the left! Satisfy people's interest in that side! :)

In the mean time - any compositional books or material you suggest I read?
 
In the mean time - any compositional books or material you suggest I read?

I agree that you could probably get something from books. I don't have any specific recommendations, only to look for composition in general. Once you learn the basics, you can then learn to critique your own pictures to see what is good and what might be improved by a crop or whatever. Eventually, you will learn to recognize good composition while out shooting.
 
$14778746577_d11fa5639d_c.webpMy crop might be, or no be.
 

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Lots of open, empty sky space, and not a lot of "engagement" with the background. I find these types of scenes tricky to shoot. The near/far relationship and the SIZE of the background rocks is difficult to capture with a wide-angle lens. I've been to that spot. The grandeur of it is hard to capture right from the bluff side like this, since it's fairly far to the rocks, and the wider angle view makes a non-panorama shot require a wide-angle, which makes the rocks seem farther away, smaller, and less-signficant in relation to the foreground brush. That's why so many shots of the Oregon coast are done from farther back, with longer lenses; it gives you literally a BIGGER, and more-magnified BACKGROUND to use to fill up frame space. A multi-shot pano here would have been sweet, and would have allowed you to shoot this a different way.

The issue you run into is the one I see all the time; landscapes that show a wide angle of a scene, but in creating the wide angle of view by using a short focal length lens, the photographers [plural] almost always mentally engage with the beauty of the scene, and end up showing us, the viewers, this large foreground, and then showing us a ton of boring, non-engaging background "stuff" that is very small, meaning actually measured with a ruler small, compared to the foreground stuff, be it shrubbery, or meadow flowers, or whatnot.

Effective composition involves effectively using the entire compositional space; in painting, the space can be manipulated out of thin air, and near/far size relationships are constructed using the artist's abilities with perspective, vanishing point, overlapping points, aerial haze, and so on. With a camera, one must fill the space based on the way a LENS draws.

Your photo would look better,better meaning more-engaging on the rocks and sea aspects, had it been say, shot from a ladder and 40 feet farther away with a lens that was 30% LONGER in focal length, to literally magnify, to make larger, the background rocks. In your composition, the shrubbery at the forefront is the star of the show, and the rocks and ocean are small by comparison. The short lens ALSO, when stopped down like that, can "see" the filter's water spots; a longer lens does not do that to such a degree, since it has less depth of field, and even at f/22, a longer lens does not "start to see" crap that's on the filter front.

I only go into this business about lenses because a lot of books on composition are written from the POV of a painter or traditional "fine arts artist", and many of them are ignorant [or kinda' fuzzy on] of the way a LENS renders distance and the way each focal length of lens renders its size/spatial relationships, so they might very well not touch upon the way FOCAL LENGTH selection plays a positively HUGE part in how one can actually make a landscape composition with a camera.
 
Thanks for the suggestions ... I have this version, which is slightly more to the left.

I still like the idea of the rock on the right in this one as I feel it bounces you into the middle with the left rock bouncing you back.... thoughts?

Ocean Mist by jamiebrightphotography, on Flickr
 
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I'm also in the same boat about working on composition. I don't get to go out much to practice on landscapes. What goes on in my mind right now on when making a shot is 1. What is my subject? 2. does my composition lead my eye to the subject? 3. Is my foreground or background helping or hurting? As for subjects, I'm learning that "a pretty scene" is not enough....your composition needs to lead the eye somewhere.

Your original composition seems a bit muddled. The foreground blends with that cool rock, which just doesn't stand out enough to command the scene. Your next shot accomplishes the goal of giving you a commanding subject, as does the crops that others have given.

I hope this is useful for you. It's what's been in my head lately.

Desi
 
Your second version is nicer than your first, but Bitter Jeweller has totally nailed it.

In your versions, it just looks like a big rock in the sea, but in BJ's crop it looks like the big rock in the sea! It towers over everything else in the frame and you can pick out the dark shadow it casts over the waves underneath it - it looks really menacing, as I imagine it does if you row your boat up to it!

Great example of how to make something fairly insignificant into the most significant. It sounds like I'm blowing a lot of smoke up Bitter Jeweller's arse here, but that one move is a composition masterclass in completely changing the atmosphere of an image through the most simple of edits. And they say the camera never lies! Isn't photography wonderful?!
 

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