Photography forum image of the month December 2011

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.

The Peace Bridge — At Last! by JAS_Photo

This month’s choice is (click to see the larger ver­sion of this image)  The Peace Bridge — At Last! by JAS_Photo

I chose this image for sev­eral reasons:

1 — Com­po­si­tion — This is a very strong com­po­si­tion and the bridge itself acts as a fan­tas­tic lead­ing line. It guides our eye beau­ti­fully into the image. In addi­tion, aside from the shape of the bridge itself, there are also other “mini-shapes” in the bridge itself as well as all around the image. These other mini-shapes add a lot of inter­est to the image.

2 — Tones and post pro­cess­ing — The bridge itself is selec­tively coloured in this image and I like that very much in this case. I feel it works and offers a new take on what is likely a heav­ily pho­tographed piece of infra-structure. For me it sug­gests ‘some­thing new’ being intro­duced into a city. The desat­u­ra­tion of the back­ground com­pli­ments the bridge and really makes the bridge pop.

3 — Story and per­spec­tive — This bridge is still a work in progress and we can see a crane in the back­ground that sug­gests this. We see the bridge “mov­ing” toward the back­ground which sug­gests to me some­thing new being intro­duced to some­thing older. The angle or per­spec­tive from which the image was taken was very well cho­sen to sug­gest this story.

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 JAS_Photo for cre­at­ing this won­der­ful image!