Photography forum image of the month – July 2012

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.

Pink by Barefoot

This month’s choice is Pink by Barefoot

I chose this image for sev­eral reasons:

1 — Com­po­si­tion — The is a very inter­est­ing and unusual com­po­si­tion of a gor­geous bird sleep­ing. I really like the curve all around the bird’s body and where the eye falls in the image. The fram­ing is also inter­est­ing here and Bare­foot has clearly ‘made this his own’. The pure black back­ground also cre­ates inter­est­ing neg­a­tive space here.

2 — Light­ing — The lovely light­ing here is soft over­all and reveals lovely detail in most of the bird’s plumage. That said, cer­tain areas of the pho­to­graph are quite dark but not too dark for my eye. I really like the dra­matic aspect of the light in those selec­tive zones.

3 — Post pro­cess­ing — The post pro­cess­ing here is lovely. Mak­ing the back­ground go to pure black doesn’t always work but it works very well here to com­pli­ment the form of the bird. I dare say that some of the darker areas in the bird’s plumage actu­ally match the back­ground and this works for me. The bird is ren­dered in desat­u­rated tones that I find very strik­ing and suit­able to the sub­ject and mood of the image.

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 Barefoot!