The Writing is on the Wall (for decision makers)

[Fred Berg]

..........

 

[KenC]

Good find, but needs to be shot closer up. You want the words to dominate the frame, so only the corner is needed here, maybe with darker shadow areas.

 

[waday]

The author made a bad decision by starting too close to the corner. I do that all the time.

+1 to the nice find, by the way. I agree with a tighter crop. There is a lot of negative space, which takes my attention away from the writing on the wall. A square crop might look nice.

 

[limr]

Good find, but needs to be shot closer up. You want the words to dominate the frame, so only the corner is needed here, maybe with darker shadow areas.

I see what you mean, but I think that cropping too tightly eliminates a layer of meaning that I find quite interesting. As waday said, the author started way too close to the corner and chose to write on a wall that is already hard to find. Broken wall, all overgrown, undisturbed leaves...who is going to see it at all, regardless of being too close to the corner or not? So it's like a little secret that we are being let in on if we are observant enough to notice it in the first place. You wonder what bad decision the author made and now you want to hear the story of how he or she came to write that in such an out-of-the way place (or at least it seems out of the way from what you can see in the frame).

Cropping too much of that context away doesn't let us contemplate any of those things.

 

[Rick50]

Yea, it's funny the second line didn't fit so he added a 3rd line. And crop some anyway.

 

[Didereaux]

My take would be to get up closer, and lower. Make the corner the strong center. Then the grafitti is both ironic, and prophetic in that the author worked himself into a corner, and the photographer made a story out of it. Location, other than the corner is superfluous.

 

[Fred Berg]

Thanks for the feedback and thoughts everyone, I appreciate it.

I think Leonore is quite near to my thinking on the composition in her interpretation of the shot. The use of negative space is deliberate and is meant to underpin the loneliness of this place. I don't know either what bad decisions the writer is referring to or which good stories might have arisen from them, but there seemed to me to be a visual story here waiting to be told: it needs space to unfold and grow.

As to concentrating on the corner, I did consider a crop to place this more obviously at the centre of attention; however, I felt that by leaving things as they are I was able to allow the eye to wander there and wonder about its significance (limr ). In the end I decided that the more subtle treatment was how I wanted to approach this.

 

[Gary A.]

I like this framing ... but I also would have looked at something a bit more creative, using the brick and brick edges and openings more. I think filling the frame with the lettering would not communicate the same message.