Ranking parts of a picture that contribute to the experience you need to convey.
I wonder if a more defined focal point would help?
Mike,
Rachel, I believe, hit on the essence of the shortcomings of this image. The picture shows an old dead tree with some residual, mostly fragmented bark on its small limbs and some moss. There's no central focus where one can give attention as nothing is any more important than anything else. One is not led by lines or movement. One doesn't find anything unique by happenstance either. Still, we do have a feeling that, hidden within it is a visual delight. That's frustrating, I know! How to unlock it?
First, the facts of life for photography outside of science and law: A picture should include what is necessary to create the illusion one wishes to project. Anything less or more must alter substantially the esthetics.
Note that if one experiences this image of the dead tree trunk, there's no feeling that it would be any more, (or any less), satisfying if it was wider or cropped. Why?
I think the answer might be that there is nothing that has been made to be more important or eye catching. Everything has been faithfully imaged with the same
rank. Stuff at the center and at the periphery are shown with the same good accuracy. As one eye moves over the image, nowhere is one asked to pause for something special. Yes, the light might be interesting in real life. However, not in this muddled image.
So what might be the solution? This is a tough call since I didn't see the whole event of the light playing on the dead trunk. I think that under-exposing the trunk, (so that less would appear), might already focus attention on the illuminated portion. Next using a wider aperture would throw less important parts out of focus. I would use dodge and burn tools in PS, (or layers of brighter and darker versions with masking), to sculpt from all the structure available. Enhance those parts which might constitute your sense of the beauty or fascination of this obviously interesting but demanding subject. Hide parts which are distracting or else contribute nothing to your intent.
As I have said many times, "There's no way that the camera, on AUTO, can reliably assign relevance, according to personal wishes, to parts of a complex subject".
You might carefully frame the trunk with light from the forrest canopy playing on it. What is captured, however, includes a lot that the brain hardly notices!
Aside: It's something like how people thought of horses running with both front legs stretched out together. Reality is far more weird. None of that grace we think of, (or people used to paint), do we see photographs of a horses running. In fact when all the limbs are above the ground, they are folded in on the stomach of the animal and not stretched out as artists have drawn for centuries! That's what the camera does to us! We get a confused "truth"! All the data bombarding our brains is filtered, modulated and reformed to give us the easier approximate images we enjoy. The camera, however, is unbiased in the sense that it only knows how to record light intensity, not significance. The latter, we have to embed by using craft and artistry.
So the challenge then here, is to hide some parts of your complex tree trunk and enhance others so there is not a "uniform" layer of disorder, but rather a sense of limbs leading the eye to artifacts that are each fascinating and encourage us to explore for more.
How to Rank What's Important to You? I'd look for a similar tree trunk and sketch it quickly from different positions. What can be done in a minute will give you an idea of what might be essential. That's for this picture to be taken afresh. For this picture you have in hand, right now, print out copies in B&W and draw on then what's important and white out the rest.
I have made some abstract derivations and these I'll show soon.
I hope this is of some help,
Asher
