Photography forum image of the month — Jan. 2010

Every month on our 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’ve come to real­ize it’s not really log­i­cal to pit images from totally dif­fer­ent gen­res against each other. That’s why there are cat­e­gories in photo con­tests. I just choose a photo that has extremely strong ele­ments that we can learn from.

This month’s choice The Con­ver­sa­tion is by casil403.

I chose this image for sev­eral rea­sons.
First and fore­most, I was drawn in by the unusual angle and point of view of this shot. This angle works very well for me! I love how just above the left statue’s head the office win­dows are nicely lit. This gives me the feel­ing of a well-told story, bet­ter than the sim­i­lar story told by the straight on shot seen many, many times. The story is office politics/or work talk etc.

I very much like the lines of the building’s roof and the lines cre­ated by the win­dows. I’m lov­ing this inter­est­ing com­po­si­tion. The way that ‘roof-line’ cuts out of the scene to cre­ate an isosceles-like tri­an­gle at top left (hey I dug geom­e­try) is fan-friggen-tastic. It adds inter­est to this scene and makes it dynamic.

The sky is beau­ti­fully con­trolled here. It adds flavour to the shot with­out over­whelm­ing it in any way.

The black and white is very well con­trolled here and works for me with this sub­ject mat­ter. If I had one teeny nit, I might bring up the high­lights in the stat­ues’ faces and hand.

Thou­sands of peo­ple pass these stat­ues every day and scores of tourists are likely snap­ping away daily… and none of them are likely to lie down on the ground or get on their knees to get this superb angle.

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 casil403 for cre­at­ing this beau­ti­ful image!