This week’s image was submitted by Jonathan Allcock. It’s a picture from New Zealand, but I’m not entirely sure if this is where Jonathan resides, or if the picture was taken during a visit there by Jon.

It looks like the photo was taken with a Canon PowerShot S3 set to an f/4 aperture and a shutter speed of 1/500 sec.

As always I have looked at this image on and off for a few days before getting into writing this critique. One of the main things I like about this image is the composition and then simply the beautiful location and the general sense of wide open space in this image.

I have visited New Zealand on two occassions myself and it’s an incredibly beautiful place to go for landscape photography. I’d love to go back there with at least 4-6 weeks on my hands to really explore the country in more depth. In some ways I find that the landscape in New Zealand is so beautiful that it can be almost overwhelming. Hence the need for more time, so you can slow down and get more connected to the landscape rather than just drive, shoot, drive, shoot, drive shoot…which is what I did quite a lot when I was there because there are just soooooo many opportunities.

While the sense of open space and the many grand vistas in New Zealand are immediately beautiful to the eyes, this doesn’t mean that this is easy to capture on film or sensor. Quite the contrary in my experience. It’s not just a matter of setting up your tripod and shoot and then move on. Grand vistas are a lot more difficult to photograph successfully than one might think.

Grand vistas require careful attention to foreground, middleground and background.

Compositional elements - Image by Jonathan Allcock

Composition and Visual Anchor

I think Jon has managed the concepts of foreground, middleground and background quite successfully here.

In the foreground we have interest in terms of the grass (a beautiful texture) leading down to the beach. The middleground is broken up with a layer of water, then the sandbank and then another layer of water. And in the background we have the small island to the left, the landscape on the horizon to the right and then finally the sky covered by clouds.

There are a couple of things which I think are really noteworthy with regards to Jon’s composition.

The layers of water and the sandbank in the middleground creates some really beautiful visual hooks which takes the viewer deep into to the image and right out to the horizon line while at the same time pointing over towards the small island to the left in the image.

The larger visual hooks in the middleground are repeated in the foreground by smaller and more subtle visual hooks in the way the grass is shaped by the wind on this particular day. To me, these smaller hooks gives the foreground some dynamic interest and rhyme quite well with the bigger visual hooks in the middleground.

If you look carefully you can even find some small visual hooks in the clouds as well, particularly in the right hand side of the image.

The small island in the top left of the image acts as a powerful visual anchor in the image and it is also one of the points of highest contrast in the image. Your eyes are taken out to the horizon by the visual hooks which then take a left turn at the horizon and point over towards the small island where you then end up resting your eyes for a while. After a little rest, then your eyes might come back down to the foreground area and you might make another round trip through the image. This helps keep the viewer within the frame and it retains the viewers attention for longer.

To me, this is quite a successful composition and probably, as mentioned above, what I like best about this image.

Improvements - Original image by Jonathan Allcock

Improvements

While the light in this image is kind of nice and soft, it’s also a little flat and not all that interesting. The light does not really sweep across the scene from one direction which would help accentuate the texture in the grass and perhaps reflect in water between the beach and the sandbank.

But you don’t always get the light you want when you are at a given location, so sometimes you just have to work with what you have. However if Jon had the opportunity to go back to shoot this scene in different light I’d definitely encourage that.

The horizon line does not appear to be entirely straight, but this is an easy fix in Photoshop or most photo editing software programs today. However it’s always best to get it straight in-camera as you will lose some data when you correct it after the fact. The more wonky your horizon is, the more data you will lose.

If you were open to change the content of the image I’d also suggest to do a little bit of cloning to just tidy the image up a little bit.

If the image is viewed large you can see a couple of people walking on the sandbank (one of them wearing a fluorescent yellow top) and in my re-worked version I have taken them out. I have also cloned out what looks like some sort of small structures on the top of the island and along the horizon on the right side of the image.

Personally I don’t find the bare area in the foreground very interesting. To me, it disrupts the foreground a little bit. and in my re-worked version of the image I’ve dealt with this partly through cropping and partly through cloning.

The cropping of the image also gives it a slightly more panoramic format which I think suits the content of the image better than the original format.

Apart from the changes above I have also made these changes in my re-worked version:

1. Darken sky
2. Lighten foreground grass
3. Saturate the colours of the ocean and sky a bit more

and so here are the before and after comparisons:

Before - Original image by Jonathan Allcock

After - Original image by Jonathan Allcock

Conclusion and Variations

All in all I think Jon has created a fine image, but still with some room for improvements in regards to lighting and perhaps other vantage points could also be explored at this location which appears to have great potential.

In addition to my proposed re-worked version shown above, I have also made two other variations of the image. Because there is not a lot of colour in the original image I think this image is a good candidate for a black and white conversion.

Personally I think I like the black and white version better than the colour version.

Notice how I have cloned out the crashing wave on the small island as well as the bright point in the top middle of the clouds in the black and white version. These areas became points of very high contrast in the black and white version. 

However I have also included another version where I have simply toned the colours right back which seems to make the image a little bit moodier perhaps.

See what you think:

Black and white variation - Original image by Jonathan Allcock

Toned back colours variation- Original image by Jonathan Allcock

I’d like to say a big thank you to Jonathan Allcock for submitting this image for the weekly photo critique here at Photography 24/7.

You can view Jon’s orignal image in a somewhat larger version by clicking the square thumbnail image at the very top of this article.

If you’re interested in submitting one of your images for the critique, you can find out more details on the page.

If you liked this article, you may also like these:

• Photo Critique No. 1 – “Fishing in Paradise”
• Photo Critique No. 6 – “Girl and Sculpture”
• Photo Critique No. 2 – “We Recycle!”