Photography forum image of the month — August 2010

Every month on our¯¿½ pho­tog­ra­phy forum mem­bers nom­i­nate images that they like. Then at the end of the month I choose an excel­lent image and talk about why it rocks. The photo I choose is not nec­es­sar­ily the best one of the month. I¯¿½ve come to real­ize it¯¿½s not really log­i­cal to pit images from totally dif­fer­ent gen­res against each other. That¯¿½s why there are cat­e­gories in photo con­tests. I just choose a photo that has extremely strong ele­ments that we can learn from.

I Got it! by Iguanasan

I chose this image for sev­eral reasons:

The deci­sive moment — Igua­nasan cap­tured the deci­sive moment here; 1 sec­ond ear­lier or later and this moment would be gone.

Sim­plic­ity & Story — The back­ground is unclut­tered here so this shot is not busy and there are no dis­trac­tions. This makes the uni­ver­sal story of a boy (let’s call him Stan­ley) play­ing in the water with his shoe even stronger. The story is well cap­tured and it strikes a happy chord in all of us.

Com­po­si­tion — Stanley’s pose is very inter­est­ing to look at and helps make this shot. Despite the water drops every­where, this is a clean look­ing image. I am glad we can see some of the Stanley’s face here. Although I nor­mally like to see more of a face, there are always excep­tions and this is one of them. Stanley’s pose and engage­ment in the activ­ity are uni­ver­sal enough that we don’t need to see the full face.

Expo­sure is well han­dled here and the drops look great. My only teeny nig­gle would be that the boy could be about 10% brighter to my eye.

Sharp­ness — The over­all sharp­ness is very good here. Some of the drops seem sharper than the boy to my eye but for me this still works well. The drops are an inte­gral part of the story and since Stan­ley is not look­ing at us because he is engaged in activ­ity, the sharper drops work for me.

For all these rea­sons, this is my choice for image of the month. Since we all have opin­ions, some mem­bers may dis­agree with my choice. That’s cool but THIS thread is not the place for debate over my pick, NOR is it the place to fur­ther cri­tique the image. The pur­pose here is to sug­gest strong ele­ments in the photo that we may learn from.

Con­grats again Igua­nasan for cap­tur­ing this uni­ver­sal moment!

I¯¿½d also like to include these 2 images as hon­ourable mentions.

Some­how prickly by MoinMoin

Krimml Cas­cades — Europe’s high­est Waterfall