;82206 said:
I went out today with the girls and dog to a local wood that has recently been harvested. I took a few pictures on the way round, but I keep coming back to this one. The brightness and emptiness, and road leading to the distance attracted me, together with the surviving tree - which makes a stand against the remaining woods being deciduous and not an evergreen pine.
Mike Shimwell The Surviving Tree
Mike,
This picture shows the mouth a wide earthen roadbed curving slightly to the left and narrowing into the distance to the horizon. By the laws of nature and following perhaps the most dominant even universally understood metaphor, "life as a journey", we are lead to follow this path. Just to be sure we cannot make an error, essentially the entire lower border is the compulsory entrance to the path and the world of the image. That's the dominant feature.
I have watched as people have commented on this picture and remained troubled that everyone seems content that the main subject is the tree, because that was the background given and the intent.
There's another remarkable feature of this photograph, hardly even seen on any other picture I can remember. The clouds are below the featured tree. This alone is a major eye catcher. The tree on the left? Well, if there was no description of it, we'd never know it was that important. Still, I do like the image and its stark simplicity. So I thought, likely it's conceptualized well but, perhaps, not framed optimally for its presentation to those not having been there and realized that just this one tree was remained after felling so many others. Since there are no tree trunks strewn on the ground, no carts or trucks overflowing with cut down branches, we do not know about any clearing of wood from looking at the picture or that the tree on the left is in any way important.
Mike Shimwell The Surviving Tree, Edits ADK
I hope you might consider this version a possible approach. I took the liberty of giving myself a challenge. Could more attention be given to the one important tree. Can we move the eye off the dominant pathway that passes your tree, as if, by coincidence. Many alterations didn't work. For example, adding or enhancing clouds could draw the eye away from the path but not to the tree. So that failed. Adding a lot of sky above seemed was useful, but the centrality of the path remains too dominant. Then I thought of making the path asymmetrical but extend the sky at the same time, keeping it empty. That shifts the eyes up to nothing and then naturally back to the tree on the left. At least, that's my idea. So I edited your image, cropping away the right side. Perhaps, now, the tree
is a little more important. Anyway, that's my try. Adding some birds might add further emphasis on this area of the picture.
Asher
