City - Death Valley State - CALIFORNIA Country - United States
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shot on california Route 190 in death valley national park. i was shooting this 5 million year-old geologic formation from the side of the road when these folks showed up. i ran out and sat on the road to shoot this. a bit hasty, i know. should've included more of the formation and less of the road. displayed as-shot. resizing and framing in PS elements. lost quite a bit of sharpness and quality in resizing. actual data was 1/640 @ f/6.7. what do you think? all (constructive) comments welcome.
Nice shot. I would have tried a wider lens just out of curiosity. For some reason, I would have liked the foreground to have been in focus. I don't know why.
hugo, thank you! glad you liked it. even happier that you had something to critique ;^) i like your crop very much. it does show the effect i spoke about and i think it works! my only issue with it is the asymmetry of the road.
i also like your and bobby's suggestion to 86 the sky. this definitely cleans up and isolates the composition. unfortunately, i shot this with a fixed focal length and was done very hastily. i usually use the zoom to frame my compositions but this lens didn't allow me that option. i should've switched and tried again. also, as desolate as this place is, it is covered with tourists in some parts. this road has particularly heavy traffic as it is the main road in dv. i took a second shot of this (same framing) a few seconds later trying to get the bikers closer and bigger in the frame but a car drove up behind them and ruined the effect.
as to the light level, it was a scorcher. bright, mostly sunny and around 11am. this was shot on our way back from badwater (see "extremes") which should tell you how bright it was. my failure here was not processing the photo for color, sharpness, and exposure. your color tweak is amazingly dead-on. makes me think you've been there ;^)
Hi Tom, again the centered approch, but I think there's a diffence here. Quite a few, actually. First of all, the slope in the road and the low camera position create an out of the ordinary effect; the road "stops" where the cyclists appear.
Secondly, the use of the background leads the eye to the cyclists, and away from the (none existent) vanishing point in this shot. This limits the depth of view nicely.
Thirdly, the human presence in such a desolated place. Excellent! It not also adds a reference to the scale (as Sai . comments) but also forms a nice eye catcher. The finishing touch, so to say.
I wouldn't be my usual self, if I didn't have something to say about the composition. You refer to the ratio Road : Rock, and I do think you have a point there. But I wouldn't go as far as to claim there should be less road, and more rock formation. I think you could've chosen a more exteme composition, IMHO, placing the cyclists more to the left, thus cropping off the touch of sky (which is a bit out of place in this shot) Looking at your shot, and the discussion we've had earlier about the brightness of an image, I think the sky was not completely clear, but slightly overcast. Tweaking the image might trick people into believing it was a bright scorching day, as also the DV reference suggests. (and looking at the cyclists, this may very well have been the case)
In the attached crop I had to remove a part of the road to illustrate what I mean as I also wanted to try the effect you suggest.
I also revived the colours a bit, a slight level tweak and a small amount of colour saturation.
Tom I like this allot. There is a evenness to this picture. Not one thing over powering another. Just even all the way back. The tones seem to blend well. Good Job ! Lee
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