Canon AF35ML (40mm, autoexposure), Elite II 50, Microtek E6

-- Andrew Y. Kim (andy_roo@mit.edu), November 22, 1998

Answers

pleasant image, but underexposed?

-- wayne harrison (wayno@netmcr.com), November 23, 1998.

exposure looks fine to me, but a little soft IMO. I like it, wouldn't mind having a print of it but where I would put the print is the question.

-- Tait Stangl (taits@usa.net), November 23, 1998.

I'd crop this down so that the sky above the mountains is one to two times the height of the mountains. This helps to place more emphasis ( SP ?) on the tree over the river.

-- Paul Lenson (lenson@pci.on.ca), November 23, 1998.

Tait, most of the softness is due to the makeshift slide scanning I currently due (which will be corrected by an HP Photosmart later this week).

I think the last two comments capture a lot of my own ambivalence about the image. Even though it was taken quickly with a point and shoot at lunch time (I was with friends, we stopped for lunch in the meadows on the way to Reno), it's my favorite picture of the trip.

Yet, I can't really say I analyzed it in terms of elements or focus at the time, mostly thought it was a nice scene. I'm particularly troubled by the busy-ness of the image, although I can't really think of how I would have better separated the foreground from the background (ideas?).

My favorite cropping of this picture has been to crop about 15% off the top and bottom, resulting in sort of a panamora view. Taking a lot off the top cuts into the tree stump that the fallen tree split from. The stump and tree are too close to effectively separate through cropping or better framing.

I like the water in front because it starts as a wide pool and pulls you under the fallen log bridge, but I try to crop it because the depth of field wasn't enough to get the nearest water in sharp focus (not much you can do about that with a point and shoot).

Any other cropping ideas for saving this from being just another marginal shot in my file cabinet, or else suggestions as to how I might have accenuated the fallen log bridge picture some more?

Thanks!

-- Andrew Y. Kim (andy_roo@mit.edu), November 23, 1998.

I don't think a picture like this can work without something interesting in the immediately foreground (e.g., a rock in the water). As it is, you've got a background (the mountains) and a middleground (the trees) but essentially no foreground.

-- Philip Greenspun (philg@mit.edu), December 02, 1998.

Philip, that's a good point, there's really nothing in the water to catch your interest at first and draw you to the fallen tree. I guess since the fallen tree is the point of interest, I should have made it the foreground. I tried cropping, but it doesn't strike me as incredibly effective:

Oh, for people who were asking about scanning on a flatbed, I rescanned this image on the HP Photosmart Scanner. I'll leave a copy of the old flatbed scanned image online for a few weeks if you want to compare...the HP gave such a better image that I could get it under the 50k limit with reasonable compression, so I had to reduce the image size compared to the original one.

-- Andrew Y. Kim (andy_roo@mit.edu), December 06, 1998.