I like it - had a look earlier when I was at work and thought it looked good there, but wanted to see it on my decent profiled monitor at home as you'd said it was toned. Hence the delay in commenting.

The twisting of the central portion appeals to me. Where is this sculpture?

Dan

Not bad, but by varying the target area you're cloning from, you can avoid the repeated patterns you got here. It can be very tricky to get things looking right, as often the brightness and/or colour will vary quite a bit, and the area you're cloning from, especially in a shot like this, can easily have a different sharpness to the bit you're cloning to.

Tonally yours looks right, but try again and see if you can avoid those patterns.

Dan

But while it's resurrected, the whole notion of a professional being able to take better photos than an amateur is absurd. What happens when the professional retires? Are his subsequent photos going to be any worse than before?

Dan

It's not a competition, and there is no right or wrong answer, so even if you're (currently) in the minority, doesn't mean that your preference is any less valid than anyone else's.

What it's shown us so far is that different people 'read' a photo in completely different ways. Although we might be, in the main, reading from left to right, some of us like to see the main subject first, then explore the rest of the image, whilst some of us like to build up to seeing the main subject. Careful investigation of my original post will tell you which of these two camps I fall into.

But (making a sweeping generalisation) we do.

Dan

I'm not saying a word...

Keep the comments coming - I find this really interesting.

Oh, and that's a good idea Fiona (about the reversed/non-reversed shots), I might look at doing that.

Dan

Hey!! Who else voted 'neither'?!?

Dan

Thanks for the comments so far, I voted 'Neither', just so I could see the results without influencing them.

This did occur to me, so I had to decide which order to put them in knowing that it might affect the result. I wonder...


Well, I've sold 7 prints and countless greetings cards of this one, so each to their own I suppose. I have to say though that for speed I used the 'over-sharpened-for-print' greetings card sized image to illustrate this, so the colours are a bit off. The print has a little more subtlety to it.

The over-exposure was deliberate, in that I prefered this exposure of the three bracketed ones I took on slide film back in 2003. It was taken at midday, and the sky was bright. The tree is actually well exposed in the original, but the sky and snow are over-exposed in places. I then exagerated that after scanning to get the clean look.

I find it fascinating that something that looks so right for me one way and so wrong the other, can be seen as completely the opposite by some of you. I'm certain that I feel that way as that's the way that I see this photo all the time, but I wonder if I'd look at it differently if I had never seen it before.

Let's hope not.

Dan

P.S. Spider, remind me to come back to your comment later.

Just out of interest, and due to the discussion in this thread, which of these photos looks 'right' to you?

1.


2.


I've seen it the 'correct' way round a thousand times, so the other way looks weird to me, but I wonder if that's just because I know how it was in real life or whether there's something more fundamental going on with the way that we read pictures.

Ta,
Dan

Outdoor Photography Magazine. The clue was in the title...

Dan

I too wrote him regarding the missing macro lenses, as well as the DSLR Listings section at the back showing incorrect 'Web Prices' (now pretty much corrected - they always used to be SRPs) and in the same section the incorrect feature listings for the Pentax cameras (exposure modes, file types etc). Chased him up about that this month too, when I wrote to him regarding the Nikon 105mm macro lens test. That letter may well be printed next month.

He seems like a very nice bloke - had a bit of an email exchange, and I promised to write to him about Pentax every month.

OP is the only mag I subscribe to now, gave up on the others a long time ago.

Dan