Rock of Dunamaise

DRicherby

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14 May 2010 - 11:10 PM

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Beautiful light and very nicely composed.

To me, this has the slightest feeling of leaning to the left, which may just be from the perspective that's caused the castle wall to lean in, without any obvious vertical on the left-hand side to balance that. (He said, naïvely assuming that ruined old wall is vertical!) I'd crop or clone out the black thing that's just intruding into the frame in the top right corner.

Constructive Critique!

DRicherby

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15 May 2010 - 12:53 PM

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I agree that the tree balances the ruined wall in the conventional sense — I should have used a different word as that's not what I meant. The point's moot, now that you've pointed out that the wall itself is leaning but I'll explain what I meant anyway, since it might be useful some day.

Aside from the walls actually leaning, there are two possible explanations as to why they're at an angle in the photograph: either the camera wasn't straight or it's converging perspective from angling the lens upwards. If there was a building on the left-hand side, whose verticals were leaning to the right, it would be obvious that the lean on the wall to the right was just converging perspective. Without a building on the left (or some other object, such as a telegraph pole, that one can use as a reference), it could be either perspective or an off-level camera that's caused the lean. Maybe it's uncharitable of me but my intuition here was that the lean was an off-level camera.

That does lead to the question of whether one should rotate an image like this to conform to the viewer's expectation that walls be vertical, even when the wall in question isn't. My own personal taste would be to rotate for a wall like this that's nearly, but not quite vertical. I think that makes for more comfortable viewing, even though it's not true to the original scene. (The Leaning Tower would be different, since it's well known to lean and its lean is more pronounced than the lean here.) Your preference seems to be to maintain the real angle of the wall and, since you've obviously weighed up the alternatives, I fully respect that choice.

Constructive Critique!